Basics of Beamforming in Wireless Communications

In the previous post we had discussed the fundamentals of a Uniform Linear Array (ULA). We had seen that as the number of array elements increases the Gain or Directivity of the array increases. We also discussed the Half Power Beam Width (HPBW) that can be approximated as 0.89×2/N radians. This is quite an accurate estimate provided that the number of array elements ā€˜Nā€™ is sufficiently large. But the max Gain is always in a direction perpendicular to the array. What if we want the array to have a high Gain in another direction such as 45 degrees. How can […]

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Laptop Orientation and Data Rate

I live in a basement and do not get very strong WiMAX signals so I have placed my WiFi router outside my home. Now the distance between my laptop (Toshiba Satellite L645) and the WiFi router is larger than I would like it to be. I noticed that the download speed that I get is highly dependent on the orientation of my laptop. So here are the results of download speeds for various antenna orientations. So I am assuming that there is some sort of surface antenna on this laptop that works well in certain directions but does not work […]

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