Patent ID: 8380133

Claim:
An adaptive beamforming method comprising: successively activating different pairs of antenna elements, wherein one of the antenna elements is a reference antenna element that is included in each pair and is activated in tandem with the other antenna element in each pair; receiving indications of relative phases, at a receiver, of the antennae elements with respect to the reference antenna element; weighting beamforming signals transmitted from the antenna elements based on the relative phases to adapt the beamforming signals to a multipath environment and thereby improve a signal to noise ratio, wherein the relative phases are computed from powers of the signals received from tandem activation of each of the pairs of antenna elements measured at the receiver; activating each antenna element in isolation; and receiving indications of a magnitude of each signal from each of the isolated activations, wherein the weighting is further based on the magnitudes of the signals, at the receiver, received from the isolated activations and wherein the magnitudes are computed from the powers of the signals received from the isolated activations measured at the receiver.