Toward A Robust Multi-Antenna Receiver for Wireless Recording From Freely-Behaving Animals

Abstract

We presented a robust multi-antenna receiver design using the multiple software defined radios (SDR), which enables the easy implementation and extension for increasing the number of Rxs. The proposed multi-SDR Rxs with the optimized antenna design of Tx/Rx, can minimize the RF blind spots of the headstage on a freely-behaving animal, resulted in the reduced Tx radiation power against spatial/angular misalignments of the antenna or the disturbance in the RF path. In the prototype design, the multi-SDR Rxs and RF antennas are dedicated to transmit/receive 9 Mbps neural recorded data modulated by 433 MHz On-off keying (OOK) in the WINeRS-8 headstage. The detail features about the hardware and software subsystems are described in the paper, and the measured results demonstrate that the proposed multi-SDR Rxs can remove the blind spot of the Tx radiation while the single Rx cannot cover all of the spots. The proposed system was also fully verified by the in vivo experiment on a freely behaving rat.