Low VHF Channel Measurements and Simulations in Indoor and Outdoor Scenarios

Abstract

The lower VHF band has potential for low power, short-range communications, as well as for geolocation applications, in both indoor and urban environments. Most prior work at low VHF focuses on longer range path loss modeling. In this report, we study indoor/outdoor near-ground scenarios through experiments and electromagnetic wave propagation simulations for both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) cases, at ranges up to 200 meters. Mounting our receiver on a robotic platform enabled the collection of thousands of measurements over an extended indoor/outdoor test area. We measure the channel transfer function with pulse and tone probe signals. Based on statistical tests, we show that the measured channels have a nearly ideal scalar attenuation and delay transfer function, with minimal phase distortion. Compared with higher VHF and above, the measured short-range VHF channels do not exhibit small-scale fading, which simplifies communications receiver signal processing, and enables phase and amplitude based geolocation techniques.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 2015
Accession Number
ADA618985

Entities

People

  • Brian M. Sadler
  • Chirag Rao
  • Fikadu T. Dagefu
  • Gunjan Verman
  • Jonathan R. Fink
  • Kamal Sarabandi
  • Paul Yu

Organizations

  • United States Army Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics
  • Autonomy
  • Biomedical
  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Bandwidth
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Global Positioning Systems
  • Information Science
  • Mobile Phones
  • Network Science
  • Operating Systems
  • Radio Equipment
  • Signal Processing
  • Simultaneous Localization And Mapping
  • Software Defined Radio
  • Statistical Analysis
  • Very High Frequency
  • Wave Propagation
  • Waveforms

Readers

  • Radar Systems Engineering.
  • Radio communications and signal processing.
  • Sensor Fusion and Tracking Systems.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Bayesian Inference
  • Autonomy