For an intuitive grasp of how an adaptive antenna system works, close your eyes and converse with someone as they move about the room. You will notice that you can determine their location without seeing them because of the following:

• You hear the speaker's signals through your two ears, your acoustic sensors.
• The voice arrives at each ear at a different time.
• Your brain, a specialized signal processor, does a large number of calculations to correlate information and compute the location of the speaker.
• Your brain also adds the strength of the signals from each ear together, so you perceive sound in one chosen direction as being twice as loud as everything else.

Adaptive antenna systems do the same thing, using antennas instead of ears. As a result, 8, 10, or 12 ears can be employed to help fine-tune and turn up signal information. Also, because antennas both listen and talk, an adaptive antenna system can send signals back in the same direction from which they came. This means that the antenna system cannot only hear 8 or 10 or 12 times louder but talk back more loudly and directly as well.

Going a step further, if additional speakers joined in, your internal signal processor could also tune out unwanted noise (interference) and alternately focus on one conversation at a time. Thus, advanced adaptive array systems have a similar ability to differentiate between desired and undesired signals.