Combining Leak feeder cable and Antenna to support Mobile network in underground mine environment

This paper reports the measurements of a hybrid radiating LTE base-station (BS) based on Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform. The hybrid radiating elements consisted of a hybrid architecture of 2 antennas and a Leaky Feeder (LF) cable to support LTE technology operating in Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) on 850Mhz radio band. All the measurements were made in a former underground gold mine. The used LF cable aimed to enhance the radio signal propagation, particularly in Non-Line Of Sight (NLOS) areas where signal propagation has difficulty to reach the destination. Also, LF cable avoided increasing the number of deployed BSs to deal with NLOS areas and reduced the transmission power of the mobile user equipment (UE) without losing the quality of service(QoS).