Implementing Vertical Beam Steering in Beam Switchable Antenna and its Market Campaign

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) also known as drones are used for both commercial and recreational purposes. However, UAVs are also becoming a threat for the society and are used for crimes such as smuggling and attacks in wars.

UAVs can be countered by methods like first detecting and then jamming or spoofing the radio frequency control signals. These methods need an antenna such as SBA2456DB. Typically these antennas have a fixed beam pointing only to horizon when it is detecting the drone signals. To increase the effectiveness and the coverage area of the detection and counter measures of these counter-drone antennas, we can use a technique called vertical beam steering (VBS). This means keeping the antenna physically in the horizontal direction as before but using a digital phase shift to control pointing of the beam in the vertical direction. VBS enables the antenna beam to be pointed more precisely towards the target drones.

The purpose of this thesis is to implement VBS to SBA2456DB, which is an existing antenna of the company called COJOT. This thesis focuses in the use case of Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems (C-UAS) of the antenna. The thesis explains how and why VBS is implemented in SBA2456DB. To analyze the effect of vertical beam steering in SBA2456DB, example use cases are modelled, taking different assumed heights and distances to the target drones. Based on these parameters, the impact of phase shifting has been studied by manually altering the phase shift of the antenna elements using electromagnetic (EM) simulations on CST Microwave Studio. The thesis discusses the effectiveness of VBS on SBA2456DB by calculating the received signal strength of the antenna before and after enabling VBS.

Different analog and digital phase shifters are studied, and conclusions have been made regarding their suitability for SBA2456DB. The most suitable phase shifter for SBA2456DB is the 6-bit digital phase shifter CHP4014-QEG because of its small size of 4 x 5 mm and its low insertion loss of 5.625 dB. This thesis also studies possible physical placement locations of the phase shifters in the antenna and concludes the optimal location to be the antenna array elements. As a summary, adding VBS increases the signal strength significantly in all the studied distance cases: for example, in the best case, a rise from -107.38 dB to -75.48 dB was observed when the drone is at a distance of 2.5 <km. In this position the drone would be in the null of the radiation pattern if there is no VBS. On an average, the received signal strength increases by 11.63 dB.

The thesis also covers the marketing campaign for switched beam antenna of COJOT. The marketing campaign discusses the business model, roles and responsibilities within marketing, user acceptance test (UAT) and the product brochure.