Impact of the mobile antenna inclination on the polarisation diversity gain in a DCS 1800 network

Base station antenna diversity can be used to soothe the impairments caused by multipath propagation, interference and random angular orientation of the mobile station. Currently the widely implemented scheme is the space diversity with horizontal antenna separation. An attractive alternative to combat the non-idealities of the radio channel is to use polarisation diversity. The aim of this paper is to evaluate experimentally the impact of the mobile antenna orientation on the polarisation diversity performance in a DCS1800 network. Additionally, the performance of polarisation diversity schemes with horizontal/vertical (HV) and ±45° slanted antenna schemes are compared to the non-diversity case. The obtained results show that in coverage limited case almost equal diversity gain and system performance can be achieved independent on the mobile antenna orientation or on the implemented scheme