Characterisation of System Performance of GPS Antennas in Mobile Terminals Including Environmental Effects

Incident waves on a GPS antenna on mobile terminals suffer from multipath effects due to reflection, diffraction and scattering from environmental objects including buildings, trees, vehicles and ground. A traditional electromagnetic approach to analyse the GPS antenna performance is therefore unable to give a correct account of the antenna working in a real multipath environment. A new technique to characterise these environmental effects on the GPS antenna is presented in this paper, defined by three parameters; GPS Mean Effective Gain (MEG GPS ), GPS Angle of Arrival (AoA GPS ) distribution and GPS Coverage Efficiency (eta c )