ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Multipath propagation continues to be the dominant channel impairment in many aeronautical mobile telemetry (AMT) applications. Avoidance and diversity techniques continue to be the only practical means to combat this problem. In 2004 limited results from the development of a new post-detection, no-hit diversity selector were reported. Late breaking results from flight test were reported orally. A review of the methodology, flight test results and conclusions are presented in this paper. Also presented is an update describing enhancements of the implementation which emphasize operational flexibility as well as support for alternate demodulator products.

ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / A single-tone frequency estimator for a non-uniformly sampled sinusoid is proposed. A nonuniformly sampled sinusoid may be generated from the received training sequences of a telemetry link. The frequency of the sinusoid matches the carrier-frequency-offset (CFO) of the received signal, and estimation of this quantity allows a receiver to compensate for the CFO. The performance bounds of this type of estimator have been investigated in the literature, though little work has been published on practical algorithms. The estimator proposed in this paper is a generalization of phase-increment estimators previously described in the literature. It exhibits a low computational complexity yet converges to theoretical bounds at high SNR. The paper argues that a periodic training sequence structure, combined with the new estimator, allows for a high-accuracy and lowcomplexity CFO compensator.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / In the past four years Congress has passed legislation mandating the reallocation of 255 MHz of radio frequency bands from Federal to non-Federal or “MIXED USE.” Several of the frequency bands supporting telemetering functions were affected, and more legislation of this nature is forecasted.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Radio frequency power margins in well planned line-of-sight (LOS) air-to-ground digital data transmission systems usually produce signal to noise ratios (SNR) that can deliver error free service. Sometimes field performance falls short of design and customer expectations. Recent flight tests conducted by the tri-service Advanced Range Telemetry (ARTM) project confirm that the dominant source of bit errors and short term link failures are “clusters” of severe error burst activity produced by flat fading, dispersive fading and poor antenna patterns on airborne vehicles. This paper introduces the techniques used by ARTM to measure bit error performance of aeronautical telemetry links.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Space-time coding (STC) for QPSK where the transmitted signals are received with the same delay is well known. This paper examines the case where the transmitted signals are received with a nonnegligible delay differential when the Alamouti 2x1 STC is used. Such a differential can be caused by a large spacing of the transmit antennas. In this paper, an expression for the received signal with a delay differential is derived and a decoding algorithm for that signal is developed. In addition, the performance of this new algorithm is compared to the standard Alamouti decoding algorithm for various delay differentials.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 21, 2002 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / Recent changes in spectrum availability as well as higher demands for spectrum have motivated the development of telemetry transmit systems capable of fully operating over both L and S telemetry bands. However, enabling operation within these two bands poses new problems in system design. This paper presents a prototype system capable of operating between 1.4 and 2.4 GHz, which supports continuous phase modulation (CPM) waveforms such as pulse code modulation (PCM), frequency modulation (FM), and shaped offset quadrature phase shift keying (SOQPSK). The system architecture is detailed, and the prototype performance is discussed.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 22-25, 2001 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper will present measured data in an adjacent channel interference (ACI) environment for both filtered continuous phase frequency shift keying (CPFSK) and Feher’s patented quadrature phase shift keying (FQPSK-B) [1]. The quantity measured was bit error probability (BEP) versus signal energy per bit to noise power spectral density ratio (E(b)/N(o)). The interferers were either CPFSK or FQPSK-B signals. The results presented in this paper will be for bit rates of 5 Mb/s, one interferer 20 dB larger than desired signal, various channel spacings, and two different telemetry receivers. The ACI test effort will collect data sets at several bit rates and with one and two interferers. The results will be useful to system designers and range operators as they attempt to maximize the number of Mb/s that can be simultaneously transmitted in the telemetry bands.

Multipath is one of the dominant causes for link loss in aeronautical telemetry. Equalizers have been studied to combat multipath interference in aeronautical telemetry. Blind equalizers are currently being used with SOQPSK-TG. The Preamble Assisted Equalization (PAQ) project studied data-aided equalizers with SOQPSK-TG. PAQ compares, side-by-side, no equalization, blind equalization, and five data-aided equalization algorithms: ZF, MMSE, MMSE-initialized CMA, and frequency domain equalization. This thesis describes the GPU implementation of data-aided equalizer algorithms. Static lab tests, performed with channel and noise emulators, showed that the MMSE, ZF, and FDE1 show the best and most consistent performance.

ITC/USA 2012 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Eighth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2012 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / The goal of this paper is to implement a model of multipath fading in a radio channel simulator for aeronautical applications. When developing a wireless communications system, it is useful to perform simulations of the radio context in which the system has to operate. A radio link is substantially composed by three parts: transmitting segment, transmission channel and receiving segment. We focus our attention on the radio channel propagation. We proposed two geometrical models of a territory corresponding to a determined flight area and, after importing the data needed to estimate our parameters, we compared our results with the channel soundings in literature, obtaining comparable values.

Aeronautical telemetry systems that transmit the same signal through multiple antennas from the flight vehicle suffer from severe link dropouts when the signals destructively interfere one with another at receiver. The underlying issue is a transmit array with element spacing far greater than the wavelength producing a transmit antenna pattern with significant and deep nulls. Recently, space-time coding techniques have been proven to resolve the issue for systems using linear modulations and shaped-offset quadrature shift keying (SOQPSK) modulation, a non-linear continuous phase modulation (CPM). This thesis examines application of space-time coding techniques to resolve the self-interference issue for another CPM modulation, the advanced range telemetry (ARTM) CPM. It is shown in this thesis among the two branches of space-time coding, space-time block coding (STBC) and space-time trellis coding (STTC), only the latter offers a solution for a full rate, low complexity, no hardware modification implementation. Various candidate STTCs are identified via simulation using the pair-wise error probability as a performance metric. One STTC is identified with trivial implementation costs and an error performance that is a function of code length.