Digital Stepping Correlator in a Wideband Radio Channel Measurement System

This paper explains the realization and the performance of a digital stepping correlator in a wideband radio channel measurement system. Radio channel sounding is based on the estimation of the radio channel by use of maximum length sequence (m-sequence) as an effective sounding signal. Signal is detected using the stepping correlator receiver. The received signal is not converted to the baseband but the sampling is done direct from the IF-frequency. Digital implementation gives also a possibility to use a windowing property when those parts of the impulse responses that do not contain signal power are abandoned during measurements. The windowing enables high radio channel sampling rates.