BESTIMMUNG DER POSITION VON ENDGERÄTEN IN EINEM FUNKSYSTEM

A radio signal travels over a radio channel in the form of multipath propagation, whereby a signal received by the base station and transmitted by the terminal equipment is composed of multipath components propagated over different distances and thus reaching the receiver at different times. Thus, the information required for computing the bearing of the received signal can be extracted from the arrival time differences of the multipath propagated signal. An antenna array formed by a plurality of antenna elements receives first the multipath propagated signal. Next, means (41, ..., 4N) for determination of channel impulse response form an estimate of the radio channel impulse response from the received signal of each antenna array element, after which correlation means (46) correlate each channel impulse response estimate with a reference estimate selected from the group of said channel impulse response estimates. Further, said means choose as the time difference of the received signal that delay value giving the maximum correlation. Finally, computational means (46) estimate the bearing of the radio signal transmitted by the terminal equipment from the arrival time differences thus determined. Using a two-dimensional antenna array, both the bearing sector and elevation of the received signal can be estimated.