Scalable Coverage Simulation Workflow for Formation-Flying Satellite Phased Arrays

Formation-Flying Phased Array Antennas synthesize very-high-gain apertures from PicoSat swarms for Direct-To-Cell links. To simulate on-the-ground coverage, end-to-end full-wave simulation becomes exponentially resource-intensive at scale. We present a compact workflow that ingests complex circularly polarized element patterns (RHCP/LHCP), applies sequential rotation and array-factor synthesis, and projects the 3-D beampattern to Earth coverage. The preliminary evaluation at 1.8 GHz shows that the simulator reproduces elevation-cut behavior and error trends, running sub-second for tens of elements and seconds for thousands, enabling rapid design-space exploration.