Hello,
I’m doing a engineering project. We need three-four receivers to implement an Angle of Arrival method. Essentially we need to calculate the phase difference between receivers. We’ve been doing some investigating but I have a question about possible using receivers. We need a cheap way to measure analog signals, and we need to do it synchronously. We were hoping to find a receiver that we could activate using a clock.
Would XBee’s work? are they capable (with minimal accuracy) of providing a buffer of samples and can we synchronize multiple receivers with a clock? Or what would you use to do this? how would you approach this problem?
thanks for your help.
-N
Well known technique: Interferometer. Very hard to implement. Key is a common time reference accurate to a few nSec. Commonly done for AoA of radar transmitters in military. Time Difference Of Arrival from three stations gives intersecting parabolic lines (with ambiguity at the mirrored image).
You can inexpensively do AoA with transmitter-hunting devices sold for Ham Radio guys- on 2m (145MHz). This uses 4 car-rooftop antennae and a signal processor that’s not too expensive.
ANother approach is what companies like Ekahau use for tracking RF tags on hospital equipment. Other companies too. It all depends on your accuracy requirement. The hard part is correlating the signals in the baseband despite high multipath.
So read up on these, and the subject Trilateration. Time Difference Of Arrival methods. Interferometers. etc.
XBees… no.