TDOA and AOA hybrid geolocation systems

The best of both worlds

Locating transmitters is an essential mission for all regulators and organizations that are assigned radio monitoring tasks. This pertains especially to unlicensed and illegal transmitters as well as stations interfering with other radio services. Traditionally, direction finders have been used for location tasks. New solutions, based on the time difference of arrival (TDOA) principle are an excellent complement to classical DF systems.

TDOA – the Rohde & Schwarz way

• The excellent sensitivity of the system provides a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This leads automatically to higher location accuracy. Furthermore, higher SNR compensates inaccuracies due to smaller signal bandwidths. Thus, narrowband signals are located much more precisely or even found at all. Thanks to the superior overall performance of the equipment, it is extremely well suited for operation in dense urban environments. There, TDOA is very advantageous but the signal scenario is very challenging for the devices.
• TDOA, angle of arrival (AOA) and even a hybrid solution are possible, offering always the best option for each task.In the case of direction finders, the same device can even serve as a TDOA receiver or classical DF.
• The equipment is available for sophisticated, ITU-compliant monitoring tasks when no location mission is running. While locating transmitters is an important task, experience shows that only a minor fraction of time is spent for it. The system is used to the greatest possible extent.
• The time a signal takes to travel within the device from the antenna input to the signal processing stage is taken into account when issuing the timestamp. This unique Rohde & Schwarz development provides higher location accuracy. In addition, it makes it possible to freely combine all TDOA-capable equipment.

Hybrid: TDOA and AOA – the best of both worlds

Both principles, TDOA and AOA have their respective advantages. TDOA works well with broadband emissions, typical for modern communications signals like DVB-T, DAB, LTE, or WiMAX™. The concept of TDOA even allows compensating effects of reflection and multipath propagation, making it especially powerful in dense urban environments. AOA has its strengths when it comes to narrowband, unmodulated or continuous-wave (CW) signals.

Consequently, the perfect system would integrate TDOA and AOA, where the operator decides case by case which one is better suited or even selects a combination of both. That is exactly what the new hybrid TDOA-AOA solutions from Rohde & Schwarz provide: the best of both worlds.