I want to buy a testbed to study directional communication. The scenario is air-to-ground and air-to-air communication. The distance is about 300 kilometers. But I am not familiar with the RF hardware. Who can introduce me a suite of directional antennas which can fill the requirement?
Are you looking for directional antennas to be used to evaluate a beam forming array, or dipole or patch antennas to create a beam forming array? For test and measurement antennas you can check out http://www.ets-lindgren.com/Antennas and look for the various horns.
You need to fix test bed requirement (Essential and desirable parameters). These can be derived out of your overall system requirements. You must calculate starting from transmitter power till receiver sensitivity. Based on path loss and other losses (if applicable - system dependant) derive antenna gain or directivity to decide the antenna
I want to test my MAC protocol developed for ad hoc network using directional antennas. The basic requirement of the directional antenna is that I can schedule the antenna pointing azimuth in real time. The other settings are not important. If required, they should be:
mainlobe beamwidth: < 30 degree;
working frequency: above 5GHz;
transmission power: > 20 W or adjustable;
communication range: adjustable;
antenna gain: > 10 dB
So by testing platform, you're actually looking for someone's pre-made beamforming antenna system that you can control from your MAC, as opposed to a system for testing the resulting beam forming that's generated. I can help you on the latter, and while I've known a few companies developing products for Wi-Fi in early stages of the game, I haven't kept up with who's doing that sort of thing now. I'd suspect with the advent of MIMO that most are integrating beamforming using the same antenna array, so the stand-alone beam forming arrays probably faded away somewhat.
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