Antenna Hopping
During a call connection, a burst can easily be lost when the mobile station happens to be located in a fading dip for that particular frequency, or if it is subjected to interference. The coding and interleaving scheme in GSM is constructed so that loss of a single burst has minimal influence on the speech quality. The probability that several bursts within a speech frame have poor signal quality is reduced if the bursts are transmitted on different paths. This can be done by using antenna hopping. With antenna hopping, transmit diversity is introduced by changing transmit antenna between bursts. Schematic picture of antenna hopping This transmit diversity scheme mimics frequency hopping in the sense that the fading changes rapidly between bursts due to transmission through different paths. From a subs...