Patent ID: 7212838

Claim:
In a radio communication system having a sending station having a plurality of spaced-apart antennas from which data is selectably sent to a receiving station, an apparatus for facilitating selection of antenna weightings by which the data is to be weighted by antenna weighters prior to application to individual ones of the antennas of the plurality of antennas, said apparatus comprising: a perturbation selector embodied at the sending station, said perturbation vector selector for selecting vector values that together define a perturbation vector to be applied to separate ones of the antenna weighters to perturb the values of the antenna weightings in amounts responsive to the vector values selected by said perturbation vector value selector, the vector values selected during a first portion of a selected time period of first values for perturbing the antenna weightings in a first direction and the vector values selected during a second portion of the selected time period also of the first values, but for perturbing the antenna weightings in a second direction; and feedback detector embodied at the sending station, said feedback detector for detecting feedback values returned to the sending station by the receiving station, the feedback values formed responsive to weighted data, perturbed during both the first and the second portions, respectively, of the selected time period, the feedback utilized to adjust the antenna weightings responsive to the feedback values.