Best paper nomination at the European Microwave Conference 2013

Nürnberg/Ilmenau, 16/10/2013. At the European Microwave Conference 2013 in Nürnberg, Germany, the presented work on the „Impact of Polarization Impurity on Compact Antenna Array Receiver for Satellite Navigation Systems“ was nominated for the Best Paper Award. The topic was part of the three-year research project “KOMPASSION”, which ended on 30/09/2013.

Project
In this project, the German Aerospace Centre, Ilmenau University of Technology, RWTH Aachen, and IMMS were working on new designs, technology and algorithms to make the adaptive group antennas needed for satnav interference mitigation more compact. Antennas of this type fulfil the high requirement for interference robustness, which is necessary, for instance, in safety-critical situations where unmanned aerial vehicles are used. They have, however, been too large and heavy to date for use in small robots or mobile devices. The developed receiving unit is only one quarter the size of a conventional group antenna but has the same number of individual elements and demonstrates the applicability of the signal treatment developed. The IMMS developed the receiver frontend circuits to link the group antenna and the digital processing electronics.

Paper
The scientists from the RF and Microwave Laboratory of the Ilmenau University of Technology, the Institute of Communications and Navigation of the German Aerospace Center, and the Institute for Microelectronic and Mechatronic Systems presented a decoupled and matched four-element L1-band antenna array with an inter-element separation of a quarter of the free-space wavelength. They studied the impact of polarization impurity in terms of the receiver’s equivalent carrier-to-interference-plus-noise ratio when impinged with different numbers of diametrically polarized interferers. They observed that strong polarization impurity of the designed circular compact antenna array, particularly for the high-order eigenmodes, reduces the available degrees-of-freedom for nulling by half in the presence of linear-polarized interferers. The obtained results lead to new impulses for further investigations and interdisciplinary research.

Further information on the conference can be found here: https://www.eumweek.com

The IMMS Annual Report 2012 (see p. 33 et seqq.) provides more details on the “KOMPASSION” project.