Experimental direction of arrival and spatial signature measurements at 900 MHz for smart antenna systems

Smart antenna systems which utilize adaptive beamforming techniques on both uplink and downlink transmissions will allow mobiles located at shorter reuse distances and mobiles located at spatially distinct angles from the base station to operate on the same frequency channel, thus providing significant capacity increase over conventional antenna. This paper presents some preliminary results of experimental studies of smart antenna systems for wireless communications. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the change in DOAs and spatial signatures of stationary moving transmitters to provide some insight into the advantages of DOA-based beamforming over spatial signature beamforming for downlink transmissions.