Inexpensive upgrade of antenna-switching cellular base-station receivers for uplink/downlink beamforming using a magnetic-loop pair or a loop/dipole triad

A simple diversely polarized antenna geolocation scheme is herein proposed to upgrade older base-stations´ nonadaptive antenna arrays to geolocate approximately mobile users and to perform downlink beamforming. Instead of retrofitting each antenna at an existing base-station with a separate temporal RAKE receiver, this simple technology needs only two horizontally oriented and magnetically small loops (plus an optional vertically oriented dipole), each with one temporal RAKE receiver. The diversely polarized system at the receiver matches the polarization of the handset transmitter´s strong vertical electric-field; and novel geolocation algorithms are herein proposed for use with these collocated loops/dipole antenna systems. The estimated approximate azimuth angle of the mobile user then facilitates downlink transmission beamforming at the base-station