This paper describes narrow-beam antenna pointing tests with a test system composed almost entirely of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components. The antenna was an 8×8 electronically steerable array and front-end designed for 5G terrestrial networks at 30 GHz. The back-end was a Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP). The USRP was connected to a dedicated processor for control and data logging. Antenna pointing direction was determined using a commercially available GPS/INS that operates as a computer peripheral. The receiver assembly was flown in a Twin Otter aircraft over several courses with different ranges and altitudes while receiving a test signal from a similarly configured ground transmitter. The receiver periodically scanned a fixed set of antenna beams and logged received signals. INS/GPS output were also logged. Post processing used channelized radiometers to non-coherently detect the narrow-band test signal and select the highest power beam for each scan. Scan results were compared with GPS/INS based direction estimates and found to be in good agreement whenever SNR exceeded 5 dB. The dominant source of error at high SNR was the relatively wide antenna beam-widths and coarse angular sampling grid.
Aircraft Antenna Pointing with COTS Components
2022-03-05
5780489 byte
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
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