Rod Waterhouse

Rod Waterhouse received his BEng, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Queensland, Australia, in 1987, 1989 and 1994, respectively. In 1994 he joined RMIT University as an academic. During 2000 Dr. Waterhouse was a Visiting Researcher at UCLA and the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC. From 2001 – 2003 he was with the venture-backed Dorsal Networks. In 2004 he co-founded Octane Wireless, an antenna and RF-over-fiber technologies company.

Dr. Waterhouse’s research interests and product development experience include antennas, wireless communications, and microwave photonics. He has over 300 publications and has developed hundreds of products related to these technologies. In 2011 he was elected to the grade of IEEE Fellow. Rod Waterhouse has served on the IEEE Antennas and Propagation AdCom since 2018 in roles of Chair of the Industry Initiatives Committee (2018 – 2024) and Chair of FinCom (2025 – present).

Title of the presentation:
Printed Antenna Technology for Compact Shared Aperture Antennas

Abstract:
Satellite communication links, including Low Earth Orbit (LEO) are a critical aspect in the 5G/6G landscape for providing mobile communication everywhere and minimizing the geolocational digital divide. Several companies are currently rolling out LEO-based systems to provide high data connectivity in rural and isolated locations throughout the world. This in conjunction with the use of GEO (Geostationary Earth Orbit) and mid-orbit satellite gateways promise to significantly improve global connectivity. It is due to this push to incorporate Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) in our mobile communications world as well as the utilization of multiple bands (to enhance capacity) that we are seeing innovative antenna concepts to potentially provide efficient reconfigurable terminals. Imperative to all the proposed antenna solutions is cost as the application is a mass market. Another important aspect is versatility. These terminals may have to be able to not only communicate with LEO systems, but also GEO platforms and so they need to be agile and will utilize multiple frequency bands. A shared aperture, phased array approach would allow this kind of agility and potentially a low-cost solution. This talk will describe some approaches to develop printed antennas that can help realize high performance shared aperture antennas required for emerging Future G NTNs.