On the potential of multimode antenna diversity

A novel way of exploiting spatial diversity by employing the higher order modes of a biconical antenna is presented. Essentially, the biconical antenna offers characteristics similar to an antenna array through multiple modes using just a single antenna element. In a multipath scenario, the radiation patterns of the higher order modes are different enough to result in low correlation between modes. Furthermore, the bit error rate (BER) when employing a vector RAKE receiver that exploits multimode diversity is found to have similar performance to that of an antenna array. Thus, the biconical antenna offers an interesting alternative to the traditional antenna array