What are digital tilts for?

Equipment
1

Friends, what are digital tilts for? How to utilize it? Thanks

2

Hello,
I understand you mean electrical tilt as opposite to the mechanical tilt.

  • For the mechanical tilt you apply an inclination to the antenna using its own support.
    For example using a special tilt kit:
    https://amphenol-antennas.com/product/21699999-2/

  • The electrical downtilt changes the internal configuration of the elements of the antenna, so it ‘deforms’ the radiation it emits. An antenna can have many tilts, each of them controlling differents elements of that antenna. For example you can have 2 operators sharing an antenna, and that antenna might have different connections for each operator frequencies (2 band 900, 2 band 2100 for example).
    In that example antenna you would have 4 different electrical tilts: 2 independent motors for 900 and 2 for 2100.

Those motors can be controlled vía software if the hw supports it. There is a standard to communicate those RETS (remote electrical tilts) to the base station controller, which is defined by AISG (Antenna Interface Standards Group).
Using AISG commands you can remotely control those tilts.

Usually the RETs have to be calibrated first time you install them (if the rets are not factory built-in) by external means (like the Kathrein ALD hw) or vía software if the base station controller has the required elements to do it.

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3

No Dave, digital tilts are different than electrical and mechanical tilts…
Thanks for writing up, in fact I am in the industry last 25 yrs :slight_smile:

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4

Ah. If you mean beamforming I don’t consider it tilt. Works differently and I think we shouldn’t call it tilt.

A while ago we got a paper from Commscope (also available here https://www.commscope.com/globalassets/digizuite/542044-Beamformer-Explained-WP-114491-EN.pdf) about beamforming.

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5

Thanks Dave for the information…

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