Vehicle location system experiment

A vehicle location system concept which utilizes narrow-band-radio trilateration has been developed for use in command and control systems designed to dispatch mobile vehicles. A comprehensive system experiment was carried out in Schenectady, N.Y., designed to evaluate the system´s performance in a severe radio multipath environment, and to evaluate the improvement in performanee realized by system design options developed to improve performance degradation of multipath, that is, redundant receiving stations and space diversity antennas. Experimental results from the system experiment show that although high instrumental precision can be realized by narrow-band-radio trilateration techniques, a severe multipath environment, such as the Schenectady area produces by surrounding hills and valleys, degrades the instrumental precision. The results also indicate that four receiving stations each having four space diversity antennas will improve performance yielding a total vehicle location error radius of 900 ft, which is standard deviation for the Schenectady area.