Automatic alignment of microwave dish antennas

Abstract

Project focuses on the solution of Microwave (MW) link alignment. Alignment is done manually by riggers by climbing up to towers of as high as 90 meters. It is very much dangerous and cumbersome. Assuring the automated alignment of antennas provides a better communication between Base transceiver stations and allows soft handover that ultimately allows its subscribers to communicate ceaselessly .Automatic alignment of microwave dish antennas will reduce the downtime which will be very helpful to telecom industry. MW antenna used in communication systems is regularly affected by environmental factors generally due to the strong wind, earthquake or some other natural disasters. Automatic alignment will provides us reliable communication between two points at large distance. Microwave communication is used for point to point links with small wavelength and simultaneously compact antenna dimensions. In the first part of the work; effects of downtime on a network are discussed and at later stage a mechanism is investigated which will reduce the downtime. Automatic alignment of microwave dish antennas can be done in two directions, vertical and horizontal. For this purpose we have made a structure having two motors used for vertical and horizontal alignment. These motors are made to operate with the help of h-bridge circuits, which are getting instructions from microcontroller. During operation horizontal alignment is done in first place to provide plane for movement and vertical alignment in second place. Full operation is feed into decision making device which in this case is microcontroller, the decision making device send instructions to h-bridge circuits to move motors in the desire directions.