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posted by on Monday January 09 2017, @01:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the antennas-not-antennae dept.

Ever wonder why your wireless router has a bunch of antennas on it these days and what MIMO really stands for and what it does? Hackaday has a recent article about a group at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory who have come up with a way to visualize how phased array antennas work.

Phased array antenna systems are at the cusp of ubiquity. We now see Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna systems on WiFi routers. Soon phased array weather radar systems will help to predict the weather and keep air travel safe, and phased array base stations will be the backbone of 5G which is the next generation of wireless data communication. But what is a phased array antenna system? How do they work? With the help of 1024 LEDs we'll show you.

[...] How Do Phased Array Antenna Systems Work?

How do you create a 'beam of microwave energy' and direct your receiver onto just the right point in space?

An excellent tutorial is presented here, but the key take away is that if we feed an array of antenna elements with the same microwave signal then we can use these elements to direct (or steer as it is commonly referred to) a microwave beam anywhere in space. This beam steering is achieved by the use of a phase shifter (or its equivalent) in series with each and every antenna element.

To make the above explanation more interesting and understandable, friends of mine at MIT Lincoln Laboratory created this direct visualization of how antenna arrays work (shown recently at the 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Phased Array Systems and Technology). It is almost as if you were to put on a pair 'microwave goggles' and looked into the antenna array!

[...] With this visualization system, you can manually move the antenna beam around with a joystick and view the lighted pattern and beam plots changing in real-time, providing an instant and intuitive understanding of phased array beam steering and beam patterns. Absolutely amazing!


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 10 2017, @08:23AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 10 2017, @08:23AM (#451945) Journal
    From the Wikipedia article:

    Electrically, it simulates a series of two or three-element Yagi antennas connected together, each set tuned to a different frequency.