One transceiver per radiator is the only effective solution for AAS says Ubidyne

20 February 2012: There is only one way to build an effective Active Antenna System (AAS) according to Ubidyne that will be featuring its LTE 700MHz uB700™ and 900MHz uB900™ Antenna Embedded Radios at this month’s Mobile World Congress 2012. While there are multiple AAS architectures, Ubidyne believes it is vital to have one transceiver or M-Radio per antenna radiator. This means that an antenna with 16 radiators - or eight cross polar radiators - will also have 16 transceivers.

“While others believe they can build an AAS with less transceivers, we will be presenting simulation results at Mobile World Congress that prove having one small amplifier per radiator is the only way to deliver significant performance benefits,” says Michael Fränkle, CEO of Ubidyne. ”The results show that only a full AAS can meet critical upper sidelobe suppression requirements with margin, while simultaneously providing the highest possible antenna gain over an electrical tilt range of more than 10 degrees. And because of our Self Healing feature, Ubidyne AAS still delivers this performance with up to four transceivers out of 16 being switched off.”

Alternative integrated antennas simply integrate a Remote Radio Head (RRH) into the antenna housing but lack innovative features to increase coverage and capacity such as electronic tilting per carrier or standard, electronic and independent tilting of uplink and downlink, or vertical sectorisation. These features have a major impact on the quality and performance of the network and are packaged in all Ubidyne active antennas.

Other vendors go half-way with a semi AAS that has one amplifier serving several radiators. This reduces the amount of transceivers but performance is significantly impaired and self healing technology cannot correct antenna pattern distortions, such as side lobes.

At Mobile World Congress, Ubidyne will be featuring its new uB700 full active antenna that supports 4G (LTE) in the 700MHz digital dividend band for broadband mobile networks in the US as well as the uB900™ that supports GSM, UMTS and LTE in the 900MHz frequency band to address mobile networks in Europe, Africa, Oceania, Asia and the Middle East. Future products are also in development for the European digital dividend bands of 800MHz and highband up to 2.6GHz as well as multi-band solutions.