Snowfield test of wristwatch-type microwave beacons and hand-held direction-of-arrival finders

摘要

We have designed and fabricated a prototype of wristwatch-type microwave beacons and hand-held direction-of-arrival finders employing ESPAR antenna as a rescue system in snowy mountains. This system has improved its performance as a finding system due to use of microwave, direct sequence spread spectrum (DS-SS), and shortening of transmission pulse duration. The performance has been tested by an experiment in snowfield. The hand-held finder proved to be able to detect the direction-of-arrival from 600m away from the beacon in LOS, and from 30m away from the beacon even buried 1 m deep in wet snow.