A LAND-MOBILE SATELLITE TRACKING EXPERIMENT WITH A DBF SELF-BEAM STEERING ARRAY ANTENNA

This paper discusses a land-mobile satellite experiment and its result s, on a self-beam steering array antenna implemented by using a digita l beam forming (DBF) technique with a compact digital signal processin g circuit using ASICs. This antenna allows automatic and open-loop bea m steering toward an unknown signal arrival direction by simple spatia l signal processing. Beam-space maximal-ratio combining was employed a s the steering algorithm. The antenna was mounted on a test van and th e 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 sa tellite. The experiment showed stable beam steering and automatic trac king under real mobile conditions, Reacquisition of the signal arrival after shadowing was also fast enough. Moreover, steering for the dire ct 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 patte rns. (C) 1998 Scripta Technica.