MIMO in Amateur radio

Ben

Question: Why don't we have 3x3 and 4x4 MIMO in ham radios?
Most radios in this day in age abet commercial are MIMO why not armature radio? I would love to have a 4 evenly spaced verticals for transmit and receive using MIMO. Using MIMO in an SDR radio would allow better receiving characteristics as being able to point a virtual antenna every possible direction and pick the best one. Beam forming for a directional path as if using a horizontal beam. Using a 3-4 antennas with 5Watts out per port for a total of 20watts would be rather neat. Most commercial MIMO does auto antenna setup for special constraints/parameters. Why hasn't the amateur community done this yet? I realize that cost has been a major factor for this, but the prices of the needed parts has dropped to a minor or intermediate cost increase.

Stan VA7NF

Been thinking about this for a while, nothing in hardware, nothing in available funds :-)

Most practical I've come up with is a separate box driven by low power; limited by the maximum power a n-way phasing control can handle.  This if followed by N (say 4) power amplifiers that each feed an antenna.  No need to worry about maintaining the phase to each antenna as the control box has an electronic zero phase adjustment for feed and receive path to/from each antenna.

Just dreaming 

Ted_Spiegel_NX6C

Having multiple thin verticals set around the house would be possible in areas where towers and yagi beams are restricted.

I am dreaming right along with you...