Distributed Antennas

For in-building coverage we need small base stations and often not a lot of bandwidth.
Abase station in a small hotel foyer does not need 5 MHz of RF bandwidth. Neither do
we want antennas visible within a public building if it can be avoided. This makes distributed
antennas quite attractive.
The idea of distributed antennas is to have a donor base station, say, in the basement
of a large building. The RF signal is then distributed to a number of antennas mounted
throughout the building. The problem with distributed antenna solutions is that losses
in copper cable can be quite substantial. One option is to use RF over fiber—a topic
dealt with in detail later in this chapter.