A land-mobile satellite tracking experiment with a DBF self-beam steering array antenna
✍ Scribed by Ryu Miura; Toyohisa Tanaka; Akio Horie; Takashi Sekiguchi; Takashi Inoue; Yoshio Karasawa; Hideyuki Inomata
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 453 KB
- Volume
- 81
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 8756-6621
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✦ Synopsis
This paper discusses a land-mobile satellite experiment and its results, on a self-beam steering array antenna implemented by using a digital beam forming (DBF) technique with a compact digital signal processing circuit using ASICs. This antenna allows automatic and open-loop beam steering toward an unknown signal arrival direction by simple spatial signal processing. Beam-space maximal-ratio combining was employed as the steering algorithm. The antenna was mounted on a test van and the basic performance was demonstrated by receiving a signal in the 1.5-GHz band in a land-mobile satellite channel with the Japanese ETS-V satellite. The experiment showed stable beam steering and automatic tracking under real mobile conditions. Reacquisition of the signal arrival after shadowing was also fast enough. Moreover, steering for the direct signal arrival was not affected even with the arrival of a strong, reflected multipath signal. The possibility for optimal combination of multipath signals was demonstrated by multidirectional steering patterns.