RF Channel Modeler Overview

STK's Radio Frequency (RF) Channel Modeler plugin enables you to perform analyses to determine optimal locations to place base stations and antenna systems for both RF and radar systems. An example would be for network planners to use the plugin in an STK scenario to determine optimal placements and transceiver settings for a wireless phone network in a city.

The plugin is powered by the Ansys High Frequency Structure Simulation (HFSS) GPU-SBR engine, a computational electromagnetic simulator that employs the shooting and bouncing rays (SBR) technique for analysis and leverages the graphic processing unit (GPU) acceleration features to reduce computation time. Placing the HFSS GPU-SBR engine inside of STK enables you to produce frame-by-frame range-Doppler data or raw receiver in-phase and quadrature (I/Q) channel data as calculated in a high-fidelity geospatial environment.

To set up and run an analysis, you need to complete the following steps:

  1. Generate antenna patterns for the antennas you plan to model, other than parametric beam.
  2. Create an STK scenario to simulate the physical environment, including importing 3D tilesets of the region, specifying custom materials, and creating objects needed for the scenario such as base stations, ground vehicles, airplanes, etc.
  3. Use the RF Channel Modeler plugin to import and configure the antenna patterns, add and configure transceivers, set up the specifics for the analysis, and calculate the results.

The RF Channel Modeler produces an HDF5 file that contains high-fidelity scattering parameter antenna-to-antenna coupling data.

RF Channel Modeler plugin overview

The RF Channel Modeler plugin is a separate download and license. You can contact tech support for information on how to get the download and license for your organization.

When you start STK, check the RF Channel Modeler license in the Additional Capabilities section to enable the RF Channel Modeler. You also need to select an STK license (Professional, Premium, or Enterprise).

Before you set up your configurations, look at the GPU settings in the RF Channel Modeler page of the Edit -> Preferences panel. To run an analysis configuration, you must have at least one graphics processing unit (GPU) available in STK and enabled. For requirements concerning the your GPU, see the latest version of the GPU Accelerator Capabilities document on the Ansys Current Release Support Data page.

Opening the RF Channel Modeler in STK

There are two ways to open the RF Channel Modeler once inside STK. You can open it by clicking the Utilities menu and selecting RF Channel Modeler. You can also have the RF Channel Modeler icon () appear in the STK toolbar area by going to the View tab and selecting Toolbars > RF Channel Modeler. You can then click the icon for plugin startup.

Explore the user interface

The RF Channel Modeler UI has three main tabs at the top. The intention is for you to step through them in order from left to right to set up and run one or more analyses. For information on each of these tabs, go to the following links:

There is also a Message Log tab in which you can view all messages produced by analysis runs. Each message lists the following information: Date/Time, Type, and Message. Click the Clear () icon to remove all message logging information from this tab.