A high-throughput satellite earns its revenue by forming many spot beams at once, each reusing spectrum over a different patch of ground. US12438581B2, granted to Viasat on October 7, 2025, claims one way to do that, covering a "multi-beam phased array antenna with disjoint sets of subarrays."
The CPC is RF beamforming and array architecture: H04B 7/0617 (transmit beamforming), H04B 7/0408 (multi-antenna selection), and H01Q 3/28 / 3/36 (array control and feeding). A clean beamforming-plus-array-control fingerprint.
The mechanism is partition. Instead of having every beam draw on the entire aperture, the array divides its elements into disjoint (non-overlapping) subarrays, each assigned to form a particular beam. That separation simplifies the control and signal routing for multi-beam operation — each subarray's beamforming is independent — at the cost of giving each beam a smaller effective aperture, and therefore a broader beam, than the full array would. It is a complexity-versus-performance trade, made deliberately.
Beamforming is the battleground, and multi-beam capacity is the prize. The disjoint-subarray approach is a pragmatic way to scale to many beams without the full cost of a fully shared, fully digital array — exactly the kind of engineering economy Viasat has long patented across its array portfolio (US10804616B2, US11601195B2, and others).
Claim-scope reality: subarray partitioning for multi-beam operation is a known antenna technique, so this protects Viasat's specific disjoint-set implementation and its dependent details, not the broad idea. Its value is defensive coverage over a particular, manufacturable multi-beam architecture. For analysts, it is a current read on how a major HTS operator is engineering capacity — by dividing the aperture into independent teams of elements.