Fast signal acquisition by an adaptive antenna moving in a multipath field

An adaptive antenna algorithm is described which acquires a signal of unknown direction in the presence of uncorrelated interference and coherent multipath by using a sequential power search procedure on a small number of stored vector samples of the field. A set of candidate weighting vectors is generated, one of which, when used to filter the antenna circuit, will usually produce the desired signal at a sufficient signal-tonoise ratio for communications. The system is tested by simulation on a mobile receiver at 1 GHz in heavy multipath conditions with several interference sources and the effects of motion and bandwidth are assessed.