Patent ID: RE40564

Claim:
A method of sectorizing coverage over a cellular communications area divided into a plurality of microcells each covering a subarea of the communications area and being divided into a plurality of angular sectors having separate transmitters and receivers, the method comprising performing the following steps: receiving a number of information-bearing telephone signals from a mobile telecommunications switching office at a common base station serving the microcells within the cellular communications area; modulating the information-bearing telephone signals onto a plurality of different analog radio-frequency carriers representing a plurality of different channel sets for respective sectors of the microcells at the base station; combining the analog radio-frequency signals for all of the sectors into a single outbound analog signal within a predetermined radio-frequency band, representing all of the channel sets for all of the sectors; converting the signal outbound analog signal directly to a single outbound digital representation at the base station; sending the outbound digital representation of the radio-frequency signal via a transmission means to a remote unit located in or near the subarea of at least one microcell; at the remote unit, converting the outbound digital representation directly to a single analog representation of the entire outbound signal radio-frequency signal within the same radio-frequency band and containing each of the plurality of channel sets; sending each of the plurality of channel sets to a different one of a plurality of antenna units for the microcell, each of the antenna units being positioned so as to cover a different angular sector of the microcell; at the antenna unit covering each sector of the microcell, receiving telephone signals within the radio-frequency band for the channel set of that sector; sending the received telephone signals to the remote unit; at the remote unit, combining all the received telephone signals from all the sectors to a single combined analog radio-frequency received signal containing all the channel sets for the microcell; converting the signal combined radio-frequency received signal directly to a received digital representation of the radio-frequency band of the channel sets for the sectors; sending the received digital representation via the transmission means to the base station; and at the centrally located base station, converting the received digital representation directly to a received analog representation; demodulating the received analog representation to recover the individual inbound telephone signals.