Gain antennas are beneficial since they boost transmitted power and received signal strength, extending wireless applications’ ranges and the data rates. However, they’re directional and have to be pointed in the right direction to get that benefit. An antenna that automatically points itself in the right direction can overcome that inconvenience.
The fully electric Redline Rapid Auto Steering (RAS) Smart Antenna System rapidly locates, steers toward, and connects to a network basestation automatically to establish a reliable high-speed connection to and from any roving transceiver node. Also called the Nomadic Virtual Fiber System, it has a full 360° field of view.
The system seeks out the closest basestation and directs its beam to it to quickly establish a link. If the roving transceiver moves, the antenna automatically repositions itself for maximum path gain. The antenna adjustments are continuous. Even in a moving vehicle, then, it maintains the best possible link.
The RAS Smart Antenna System is designed to be used with Redline’s RDL-3000 broadband wireless system, which uses an enhanced IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) radio technology with time division duplex (TDD) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and 2x2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) to establish point-to-point and point-to-multipoint links. It operates in the 4.9-GHz public safety band and the 5.2- to 5.8-GHz band. Under ideal conditions, the system can deliver 100-Mbit/s performance at a range of over 120 km.
The RAS Smart Antenna and RDL-3000 system target the oil and gas, utility, and military markets. They can be used in real-time machine-to-machine (M2M) systems, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), high-resolution video surveillance, Wi-Fi access point backhaul, and a variety of broadband services. Such systems often use short-range wireless technologies like ZigBee, ISA-100.15, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth for sensor data collection or actuator control. These radios connect with a nearby gateway where their data is aggregated and sent to/from the RDL-3000 system via Ethernet. The system then finds the closest basestation with a Smart Antenna scan and retransmits.
