Ultra-wideband (UWB) as a technology for fine-grained ranging has gained a lot of attention in recent years. After the release of IEEE 802.15.4z, an amendment to the standard for more secure UWB ranging, many end-user applications, such as precision key finders or keyless entry systems in cars, were introduced. Despite the fact that UWB is used in our daily lives, no method has yet been proposed for comparative evaluation of UWB wideband ranging measurements. Individual UWB devices have been studied in the literature for their range accuracy, but these do not take into account the orientation of the devices. Still, in everyday life, we carry our devices around with us or put them in our handbags, so their orientation is constantly changing. This work introduces GWEn a Gimbal-based platform for Wireless Evaluation that enables automatic evaluation of UWB ranging with respect to orientation. To validate the usability of GWEn, a series of experiments were conducted. Furthermore, four devices that have never been evaluated in the literature were tested for their ranging accuracy. With GWEn, future UWB-ranging devices can be evaluated and compared with each other in an automated manner and under real conditions. This work is part of the paper Smartphones with UWB: Evaluating the Accuracy and Reliability of UWB Ranging by Heinrich et al.

This work has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Hessen State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts within their joint support of the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE and by the LOEWE initiative (Hesse, Germany) within the emergenCITY center.