Ball, E.A. orcid.org/0000-0002-6283-5949 and Joseph, S.D. orcid.org/0000-0001-9756-7596 (2023) A portable 28-GHz channel sounder platform and measurement results from close-to-ground field tests. IEEE Open Journal of Instrumentation and Measurement, 2 (2023). 8000111. ISSN 2768-7236
Abstract
This article describes a novel, bespoke, and low-cost 28-GHz RF TX and RX front end design that has been combined with a commercial Software-Defined Radio and Raspberry Pi controller to realize a portable propagation measurement system for the 28-GHz band. The complete sounder system can resolve an impulse from RX powers down to −107 dBm (3-dB impulse SNR) and the sounder TX can generate a signal of −8 dBm. Therefore, using 20-dBi antennas supports path-loss (PL) measurements of 139 dB. The sounder can resolve time-domain reflections to 33 ns in a channel measurement bandwidth of 60 MHz, producing both time-domain and frequency-domain results. The complete sounding system has been used to perform close-to-ground RF channel measurements, with propagation loss models and time-domain impulses extracted. Close-to-ground measurement is an underreported area of propagation research that is relevant for novel use-cases, such as in military applications or for mobile device-to-device communications. A key initial finding from the trials is that the PLs for 28-GHz indoor and outdoor links at circa 70 cm above ground seem close to that of free space, with very few strong reflections with delays exceeding 33 ns.
Metadata
Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. | ||||
Keywords: | Loss measurement; Antenna measurements; Delays; Radio frequency; Millimeter wave communication; Transceivers; UHF measurements | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield | ||||
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering (Sheffield) | ||||
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Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield | ||||
Date Deposited: | 24 Jul 2023 13:59 | ||||
Last Modified: | 24 Jul 2023 13:59 | ||||
Status: | Published | ||||
Publisher: | Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) | ||||
Refereed: | Yes | ||||
Identification Number: | https://doi.org/10.1109/ojim.2023.3259025 |