| 摘要 |
<p>An improved method and apparatus for measuring the strength of a radio frequency (RF) signal (Fig. 3) subject to Rayleigh fading is described. The strength of the RF signal is sampled two or more times during a predetermined time interval and the sampled signal strength having the largest magnitude is selected (Fig. 4). The selected signal strength is a reasonably accurate measure of the signal strength since the true average strength of a Rayleigh fading signal is close to its peak signal strength. The inventive method and apparatus is particularly well adapted for use in a scanning receiver (Fig. 2) located in a base station radio (111, 121, 131) of a cellular radiotelephone communications system (Fig. 1). The scanning receiver (Fig. 2) includes an antenna selector (102) for selecting one of a plurality of sector antennas, an RF signal receiver (104) tunable to a plurality of different RF signal frequencies, an analog-to-digital converter (106) for converting RF signal strength samples to a binary data signal, and a microprocessor (114) together with peripheral devices (108, 110) for controlling the operation of the antenna selector (102), RF signal receiver (104) and analog-to-digital converter (106).</p> |
