Measurement of Pathloss for Train Passengers in an Antenna Corridor

In this paper, the measured median pathloss between the ports of a pencil-beam antenna as a base station antenna near the railway track (i.e., antenna corridor), and a dipole antenna onboard a train wagon is presented. The dipole antenna which represents a typical user equipment e.g., a laptop, a smart phone, tablet etc., was placed at a common passenger position. The selected wagon is an ordinary Swiss inter-city double-deck wagon recently equipped with RF-friendly windowpanes. Here our focus is the port-to-port median pathloss at around 3600 MHz band. The results highlight that the excess pathloss into the wagon compared to the line-of-sight free space pathloss with similar antennas is within the range 15-38 dB. We further address the polarisation pathloss imbalance present inside the wagon and quantify it. This imbalance is an outcome of the presence of non-rich multipath inside the wagons equipped with RF-friendly windowpanes. In the end, we show that the paths through the closest windowpane to the user equipment are likely the dominant ones and thus determining the pathloss.