Channel Sounding for D-Band Measurements

With the advent of new technologies introduced with each cellular generation, there is need to characterize a variety of different communications links. Areas, such as software defined radios, have been explored to fill flexibility needs for dynamic sounding. Also of heavy interest is exploring the terahertz frequency band for communication potential in 6G. However, numerous channel sounding measurements must be collected to properly support channel models for this region. The work detailed in this thesis aims to address this current research areas, with three main contributions: (1) detailing a flexible software define radio channel sounding architecture for easy, configurable channel sounding, (2) a comparison of sounding waveforms within a software defined radio framework, and (3) a detailed D-Band channel sounding framework and short-range path loss measurements. In the first contribution, a low cost radio (Ettus B210) is used as the channel sounding transmitter with a frequency retuning software to overcome the small instantaneous bandwidth of the low cost transmitter. In the second contribution, an upgraded version of the SDR channel sounder transmitter from the first contribution is used to compare different sounding waveforms. Each of the waveforms were tested within the same channel sounder architecture and the results were compared to make recommendations about which waveform to use in a variety of circumstance. In the third contribution, a new channel sounder, with sub-THz up and down conversion, was used to collect path loss measurements at D-Band. In these contributions, we target addressing two prominent areas of channel sounding research: use of low-cost radios for channel sounding and (sub-)terahetz frequency channel characterization.