Computation of mean effective gain from 3D measurements

Performance evaluation of antennas used in the a mobile radio channel is a non-trivial task because of the multipath propagation inherent to this type of channel. A useful measure of the performance of a given antenna is the mean effective gain (MEG) which is the mean received power relative to some reference. In this paper computation of the MEG is investigated based on measurements of the 3D signal distribution in an indoor environment, where the transmitter is placed outside, as in a typical urban micro cell. A main advantage of the method used is that performance testing of different antenna designs in an environment can be carried out with a single propagation measurement and measurements of the antenna radiation patterns. In the paper MEG results are given for different receiver locations in the building for three typical cellular handset antennas and the results are verified with propagation measurements made directly with the antennas.