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Location
We will have one earth station located in the Nevada desert at 37o 53' 54.29" N, 117o 02' 44.46"W. This location was chosen both for its distance from civilization (minimizing both land costs and safety/security concerns) and its dry climate (minimizing atmospheric effects on power transmission). This station will house the rectenna for receiving and converting RF energy to electricity as well as the necessary communication equipment for the management of the satellite systems.
Rectenna
The Earth Station will feature a rectenna for the collection of transmitted RF power. The rectenna will be approximately 3.4km in diameter, covering 9km2 of land.
The rectenna consists of an array of 227 billion half-wave dipoles arranged in an equilateral triangle orientation. In such an orientation, each dipole and its six nearest neighbors form six equilateral triangles. Each side of these triangles is 0.64 wavelengths in length. For our operating frequency of 30GHz this works out to 64mm. This arrangement has been shown in lab experiments to increase the efficiency of the rectenna by 12% over traditional rectangular element orientations.
