Innovative and cost-effective method to measure vehicle antenna radiation patterns and data throughput

Vehicle manufacturers have historically relied on drive tests on public roads or test tracks, to evaluate the performance of the vehicle’s communication system, but this method has several limitations. Drive tests represent real-world conditions simply because they are performed in the real world. However, they are not repeatable due to the changing environment and disturbances, which makes it difficult to assess the communication system’s performance accurately. Additionally, these tests can only be conducted on nearly finished vehicles.

To overcome these challenges, alternative approaches have been proposed, such as simulating the environment in a laboratory setup. This involves placing multiple antennas in specific configurations around the vehicle and feeding them with signals to mimic real-world conditions. However, determining which environments to simulate and ensuring the worst-case scenario is accurately represented, remain significant challenges.

In 2000, Professor Per-Simon Kildal founded Bluetest to address these challenges by developing reverberation chambers for testing mobile devices in rich isotropic multipath (RIMP) environments. These chambers replicated complex multipath scenarios but didn’t account for line-of-sight (LOS) conditions, essential for testing point-to-point communication links. To address this gap RanLOS was established in 2016, with the aim to develop cost-effective and smart solutions for testing LOS edge environments. Professor Kildal’s hypothesis was that all real environments could be described as something in between the two edge environments (RIMP and LOS). Hence, devices tested with good results in both edge environments would excel in real-world scenarios.