Antennas for UWB communications: a novel filtering perspective

System performance in terms of range and error rates is improved by transmitting as much power as possible. For UWB systems, this translates to transmitting a pulse for which the EIRP occupies the permitted FCC mask as fully as possible. This objective can be pursued by incorporating the knowledge of antenna transfer functions into the antenna and system design process. By allowing the receive antenna to have a different design from the transmit antenna, the system designer obtains flexibility that allows for the optimization of the received pulse within the receiver's circuitry. The work presented in this paper extends the methodology of antenna design and characterization based on the transfer function defined in Zwierzchowski et al. (2003) by introducing methods of equalizing and optimizing the received pulse through a consideration of the entire transmit/receive antenna system.