Patent attributes
An arrangement comprising a master unit and one or more slave units, where the master sends out bursts, at specified intervals, in a frequency hopping manner, with each burst being at a different frequency. The slave responds with acknowledgements, and the signal strengths of the acknowledgments are used to select one or more of the acknowledgments as the signals used for distance, or range, estimation. Advantageously, the durations of the intervals are fairly long during normal operation, and short at times when certain conditions occur, such as loss of communication or when accurate range estimation is required. Also, the slave is adapted to sleep while it is not expecting a burst transmission from the master, thereby saving power. The frequency hopping sequencing is preferably pseudo random, with a different sequencing of the same set of frequencies at different modes of operation.
