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Cyclops Knows Where Your Signal is Coming From

By Joan Palacious, Antenna Research Engineer

Figure 1: Cyclops mmWave field imaging tool

Pivotal announced Cyclops™, the first portable Holographic Beam Forming™ (HBF) scanner, at the 2025 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This blog explains why Pivotal developed Cyclops and about its own experience using the product.

Created by mmWave Experts

Pivotal field techs can confirm that beamforming antennas are necessary to close mmWave link budgets, as well as to determine where the signal is coming from, so site surveys can be more cost-effective. Pivotal described these benefits in an earlier blog, mmWave Mythology, Part IV. Now other field techs can enjoy these benefits too, along with the small size, low weight and low power consumption, i.e., long battery life, afforded by HBF.

Bouncing Around

mmWave Mythology, Part IV used Figures 2 and 3, below, to underscore the importance of knowing where a signal is coming from to assess its durability . The signal in Figure 2 reached the observer not through the tree but by a ground bounce and a building façade bounce (Figure 3). This fact allowed the installer to conclude that the more durable of the two reflections would probably be the building façade because snow on the street could negate the ground bounce.

Figure 2: View of a ground bounce, left, and as depicted by Cyclops before real-time visualization (right).
Figure 3: View of a building bounce, left, and as depicted by Cyclops before real-time visualization (right).

More Testing

After real-time visualization was added, Cyclops was evaluated at the Embassy Suites hotel in Bellevue, WA, where Pivotal maintains a product test lab. To begin, Cyclops validated Pivotal’s proprietary RF planning tool prediction of indoor FWA service coverage from the gNB shown in Figure 4, which augments Figure 2 from an earlier blog, Pivotal’s 5G Test Lab. Cyclops went a step further by visually identifying the gNB reflection point in Figure 4 (see also Figures 5 and 6). This way, Pivotal field techs could, given the significant foliage between it and the hotel, speculate about the reflection’s durability. Pivotal then validated Cyclops’ reported metrics using KPIs from an outdoor CPE. The CPE, however, could not visualize, for the users, where the signal was coming from.

Figure 4: FWA coverage from one gNB to three sides of the Embassy Suites hotel using one Pivot 5G repeater and one reflection.

Figure 5: View of reflection from hotel front parking lot Figure 6: View of reflection from inside hotel suite

Solving a Mystery

Pivotal’s proprietary RF planning tool, WaveScape™, disqualified room 423, located on the north side of the hotel, due low RSRP. On-site measurements using commercially available CPE inside 423 showed, to the contrary, high RSRP and SINR, resulting in 616 Mbps of downlink throughput. How could this occur given that 423 is non-line of sight (NLOS) from the gNB and the Pivot 5G repeater was turned off? Cyclops identified the signal source as a nondurable reflection from a guest vehicle parked in the north lot, Figure 7, resulting in the high RSRP, SINR and downlink throughput. Cyclops solved the signal mystery while validating WaveScape’s prediction that 423 was not qualified as Spotlight 5G FWA Ready.

Figure 7: Nondurable reflection identified by Cyclops field scanner.

Conclusion

Pivotal field techs understand the importance of not only detecting and measuring RF energy, like a CPE can do, but also seeing its source with their own eyes, which Cyclops can do. Cyclops combines RF scanning and real-time visualization overlays so field techs everywhere can quickly and easily localize signal sources in scenarios ranging from site acquisition to diagnosing issues in 5G network deployment and operation for FWA, stadiums/concerts, mobility, and other use-cases.