Additive manufacturing (AM) is a rapidly developing field which potentially decreases the manufacturing costs and enables increasingly complex antenna shapes. Metal-based AM might be particularly useful to manufacture antennas at mm-wave range, because there antennas are physically small enough making additive manufacturing cost efficient, and manufacturing accuracy could still suffice for good electrical performance. In this paper, two additively manufactured and an identical machined fully metallic Ka-band Vivaldi antenna arrays are compared. The manufactured antenna arrays are compared using RF-measurements to conclude the feasibility of AM for manufacturing antenna arrays at mm-wave frequencies. Comparison of the measured radiation patterns and realized gains of each of the antenna arrays between 26 and 40 GHz shows close to identical radiation patterns for all the arrays. A loss in efficiency of 0.51.5 dB is observed in the AM arrays when compared to the machined array due to the used materials and the surface roughness.
In this letter, over-the-air (OTA) tests of the performance of the IEEE 802.11p radio system are performed in a reverberation chamber (RC) that is equipped with a fast rotating mode stirrer. By varying the speed of the mode stirrer, different levels of Doppler spreads are created, and the 802.11p radio system is tested accordingly. As expected, the Doppler spread affects the package error rate (PER) of the radio system adversely. In addition to measurements, a simple PER model is presented, which sheds some light into the OTA tests.
Reverberation chambers have in recent years been validated as efficient tools for measuring multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Nowadays, cooperative systems are beginning to gain attention as the key to reach high speeds in the wireless environment. These systems often implement the so-called distributed MIMO. A simple method is proposed for characterizing distributed MIMO systems in reverberation chambers. Results for capacity and correlation are shown for three different distributed MIMO systems.