Short-range propagation measurements were carried out using ultra wideband (UWB) and continuous wave (CW) signals on a rectangular aluminum conductive plate, simulating typical office desks, with and without a low vertical metal partition panels. The frequency of the UWB signal spanned from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz and that of the CW signal was 6.85 GHz. A vector network analyzer and two omnidirectional UWB antennas were used to obtain the frequency-domain response of the propagation paths. With the partition panel, the CW reception level showed approximately a 20-dB spatial variation, induced by the interference between the direct and the reflected waves, but the UWB reception level had no particular plunges. The additional losses were also measured when the 500-mm propagation path was blocked with a human arm, a coffee cup, and a copy paper pile and when the receiving antenna was covered with a human palm on the plate without the partition panel. The maximum additional propagation losses were found as follows: 10-12 dB by a human arm, 10 dB with a coffee cup, and 2 dB with a paper pile. Further additional loss caused by a palm covering the antenna was found to be 10 to 12 dB, mainly due to palm absorption.

This paper theoretically analyzed the performance of the RAKE combining (in the time domain), maximal ratio combining (in the spatial domain), and two-dimensional RAKE combining (in the spatial and time domains) techniques for multipath fading environments, where multipath waves are distributed in the spatial and time domains. The analysis was based on a diversity combining technique that employed the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix between branch signals. It was found that the performance of the fading mitigation was normalized by the beamwidth of an array antenna, for various parameters such as the number of antenna elements, angular spread, and angle of arrival.