V.I. Djigan1

1 Institute for Design Problems in Microelectronics of RAS (Zelenograd, Moscow, Russia)

1 djigan@ippm.ru

Formulation of the problem. The Digital Beamforming Antenna Arrays (DBAA) are widely used as the directional antennas in radio systems today. However, such arrays typically do not have a radiofrequency output. Consequently, the standard methods for measuring the Radiation Patterns (RP), based on the transmitting of a monochromatic probing signals, reception of the signals in the far field, as well as measuring the output power of the antenna array, cannot be used to measure the RP of the DBAA. The method considered in this work involves the transmitting a probing signal modulated by a pseudonoise sequence and processing the DBAA output signal at the zero intermediate frequency (base-band) using a matched filter or a correlator.

Target. A method for measuring the radiation pattern of the DBAA is considered, based on the correlation processing of its output signal.

Results. The paper presents a description of the setup for measuring the DBAA RP, as well as a mathematical explanation of the measurement procedure. It is shown that the accuracy of the RP measurement depends on the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) at the outputs of the receivers of the DBAA channels, and the number of array channels and the number of symbols of the pseudonoise sequence used for the modulation of the radiated signal. The error in the RP measurement decreases by 3 dB each time as the number of the DBAA channels or the number of symbols of the pseudonoise sequence used in the measurements is doubled. This result is confirmed by simulation the measurement of RP of the eight- and sixteen-channel linear DBAA using pseudo-noise sequences of maximum length (M-sequences) with a number of symbols equal to 1023 and 2047.

Practical significance. The proposed method does not require the usage of the up-converter to convert the base-band DBAA output signal from the base-band to a carrier frequency, and it also does not require the usage of a power meter for measurement the analog signal at the output of this converter.

Djigan V.I. Method for measuring radiation patterns of digital antenna arrays. Radiotekhnika. 2024. V. 88. № 6. P. 149−158. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18127/j00338486-202406-18 (In Russian)

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