This past week I spent some time preparing for my team’s project proposal presentation which helped me get more comfortable with talking about our project and helped me be able to explain it to others better. It also helped me to reinforce some of the parts of the project that I was previously less informed about.
Regarding moving forward with the project I started to come up with a plan for how we were going to setup the antenna array. I came up with an idea for a 3D printed or machined piece of plastic that would allow us to place specifically spaced holes for the antennas to go through. By attaching the antenna’s to a rigid body we would be able to get them at very specific spacings and angles in order to get the best results for beamforming. It would also allow us to quickly prototype if we needed to make adjustments to the spacings in the future (note: while outside the scope of our capstone project this theoretically means that our overlying system could be adapted to support beamforming with different antenna’s and spacings for other frequencies). Since the antennas would be mounted to this board we would connect them to a custom PCB over individual wires, and then use a larger header on that PCB in order to interface it with either our FPGA or Software Defined Radio system.
While I still need to discuss it with my group after additional research I personally believe that GNU Radio will be more difficult than trying to implement our own DSP functionalities in an FPGA. This upcoming week we will start focusing more on the exact spacing for our antenna and start searching for which specific antenna’s we are going to order so that we can get started with prototyping as soon as possible. I will also get started on doing research into the kind of requirements needed for making a PCB with high frequency RF signals. Some key focuses for that will be trace impedance, trace width, trace isolation (to prevent cross-talk/noise), and I will try and find any other possible best practices.