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.

“A multi-beam phased array antenna system includes a beamformer responsive to control signals to convert between a plurality of subarray signals and a plurality of beam signals.”— U.S. Patent No. 12,438,581 source

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.