Bit error rate performance of quadrature modulation transmission using reconfigurable frequency selective surfaces

A low-complexity radio transmitter is implemented and evaluated using a novel direct antenna modulation (DAM) technique incorporating a reconfigurable antenna. The antenna uses reconfigurable frequency selective surfaces (FSS) to directly phase modulate a radio frequency carrier wave with a quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation. A hardware-in-the-loop demonstration of the transmitter in a single in single out (SISO) communications system has been developed. To achieve a BER of 10−4 the proposed system required only 4dBm extra transmit power compared with instrument grade transmission.