Bit-Error-Rate Performance of Quadrature Modulation Transmission Using Reconfigurable Frequency Selective Surfaces

A low-complexity radio transmitter is implemented and evaluated using a novel direct antenna modulation technique incorporating a reconfigurable antenna. The antenna uses reconfigurable frequency selective surfaces to directly phase modulate a radio frequency carrier wave with a quadrature phase-shift keying modulation. A hardware-in-the-loop demonstration of the transmitter in a single-input-single-output communications system has been developed. To achieve a bit error rate of 10-4, the proposed system required only 4 dBm extra transmit power compared to instrument-grade transmission.