12th International Symposium on Antenna Technology and Applied Electromagnetics and Canadian Radio Sciences Conference, Antem/URSI 2006, Montreal, Canada, 17 - 19 July 2006, (Full Text)
Third generation mobile communication systems based on the WCDMA air interface employ RAKE reception. Increasing the number of Rake fingers, helps to capture more multipath energy but at the expense of increased receiver complexity. Mobile radio channel measurements at 1945 MHz and 2135 MHz were carried out in Manchester city centre. Statistics of relative power and excess delay of multipath components were analysed to determine the optimum number for Rake fingers based on the percentage of captured multipath energy. Then the probability of bit error for a WCDMA system was predicted for different propagation conditions.