Heliplat: a HALE Platform for Telecommunication and Remote Sensing Applications

this paper we present preliminary results of a feasibility study of a HALE platform as a base station of a cellular system. In particular we will focus on the topic of the adaptive antenna array required to provide high quality of service all over the macrocell; in fact as it can be seen in Figure 3, because of the high altitude of the base station, the theoretical coverage area can be quite large. While in GSM systems the cell size is limited by maximum propagation delay xed by standard [4], in third generation system (UMTS) based on CDMA techniques the system is interference limited, due to the high number of transmitting user in the area covered by the platform base station. The use of multiuser detection and smart antennas on board is necessary to reduce the interference power on the user bandwidth.