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Author ORCID Identifier

0009-0002-4931-0539

Date Available

8-5-2026

Year of Publication

2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MSEE)

College

Engineering

Department/School/Program

Electrical Engineering

Faculty

Robert Adams

Daniel Lau

Abstract

The construction of phased array antennas has traditionally been an expensive and complex task. It has recently been claimed that it is possible to construct high-performance Wi Fi antenna arrays using inexpensive consumer components. Motivated by some limited data available from online presentations of such devices, this thesis covers an attempt to construct a phased-array Wi-Fi antenna using several ESP32 chips, which have native Wi-Fi modulation and demodulation capabilities. While there are many positive aspects associated with utilizing ESP32 chips for this purpose, a key challenge is the inherent phase incoherence of their internal Phase Locked Loops (PLLs). The approach taken here to achieve phase coherency is to supply a reference Wi-Fi signal across traces with known length and impedances to each microcontroller. The relative phase between the individual PLLs is then measured using on-chip channel state information (CSI). This CSI phase measurement is compared to the expected phase of a reference signal to determine each microcontroller's relative phase offset. To prove the viability of this solution, a frequency and phase coherent antenna array was designed using five ESP32-S2 chips for the purpose of performing angle of arrival calculations of Wi-Fi signals using a 2-by-2 array of EPS32 receivers.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2026.413

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