Examination of antenna combinations for UWB ranging system

In this paper, several combinations of antennas for ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging are examined. Due to the large bandwidth of the pulse signal, wideband antennas are generally required. Depending on the characteristics of the antennas, the pulse waveform is distorted and the received signal power is reduced. This may increase the timing errors of synchronization at the receiver. Therefore, the characteristics of transmission and reception antennas influence the accuracy of ranging capability. In this paper, the received pulse waveform with different combinations of transmission and reception antennas is measured, and the performance of the pulse synchronization scheme applied for UWB ranging is investigated. It is shown through computer simulation that the received signal with the wideband antennas suffers from the least path loss. However, for the purpose of ranging with a high-speed comparator, the degradation on the estimation performance due to the use of the monopole antenna is limited and it can be used in the transmitter of RF tag systems.