Big office buildings, shopping malls and other public buildings usually have poor indoor mobile coverage. Problem is solved by building indoor cells which includes cables and many antennas across all floors. This solution is called Distributed Antenna System (DAS). Network signal is inserted to DAS using a repeater or a base station.
Most time consuming part of DAS design is calculating link budget for antennas. In an ideal system signal attenuation from the source to each antenna is equal. There are two ways of achieving that: One includes a lot of manual data editing in Excel which makes it time consuming and error prone. Second is using special software that needs server and an expensive licence. These solutions are too expensive for freelancers and even operators find it unreasonable for small and medium sized indoor DASs.
We are building a DAS planning tool for calculating link budget, which offers a cost-effective and time-saving way so that only a browser and internet connection are needed.
By using a simple interface for placing the components and cables on the plans, the system automatically calculates the resources needed for the system. Making any unexpected changes to a project goes without painful reworking - all changes are reflected in the output immediately.
Optimizing and calculating link budget for an average DAS for 7 floors, 37 antennas and over 800 meters of cable takes about two full working days with Excel. With a graphical tool it is possible to do all that with under 4 hours.
This would mean over 10 hours of Radio Planner time saved for an average project.