ITC/USA 2009 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Fifth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2009 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Multi-h Continuous Phase Modulation (CPM) is a promising waveform for aeronautical telemetry because it is a compact spectrally efficient constant amplitude modulation. It has been selected as the Advanced Range Telemetry (ARTM) tier II waveform owing to these qualities. However, it is also a complicated waveform that has the reputation of suffering from complex demodulation processing and high sensitivity to transmission impairments and in particular synchronization aspects. In this paper we review a set of complexity reduction techniques that intend to bring this waveform into the domain of operational telemetry waveform, by allowing low complexity hardware implementation without sacrificing performance or robustness. Most techniques are adjustments of recent literature results, concerning both demodulation and synchronization. Computer simulation of a receiver implementing theses techniques shows negligible performance loss compared to optimal coherent demodulation with perfect synchronization. Hardware implementation confirms that nearly optimal performance can be achieved with hardware resource currently available in middle range FPGAs.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 22-25, 2001 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Shaped Offset QPSK (SOQPSK) has been shown to be nearly identical in performance to Feher-patented FQPSK, which is the Advanced Range Telemetry (ATRM) program's Tier I waveform. Multi-h CPM has been selected as the ARTM Tier II waveform, because it offers 50% better spectral efficiency than the Tier I waveform. Both the Tier I and Tier II waveforms must operate in a multipath channel in order to meet the range community's telemetry requirements. This paper presents an analytical and experimental characterization of SOQPSK and Multi-h CPM in the presence of multipath. Quantitative results are presented which demonstrate the relative robustness of the ARTM Tier I and Tier II waveforms, in channels representative of a typical range environment.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Improving the spectral-efficiency of aeronautical telemetry has been a principal area of research over the last several years due to the increasing demand for more data and the limitation of available spectrum. These efforts have lead to the development of the ARTM Tier 1 SOQPSK and Tier II Multi-h CPM waveforms which improve the spectral efficiency by two and three times, as compared to legacy PCM/FM, while maintaining similar detection efficiency. Now that more spectrally efficient waveform options are becoming available, another challenge is to further increase the detection performance. Better detection efficiency translates into additional link margin that can be used to extend the operating range, support higher data throughput, or significantly improve the quality of the received data. It is well known that Forward Error Correction (FEC) is one means of achieving this objective at the cost of additional overhead and increased receiver complexity. However, as mentioned above, spectral efficiency is also vitally important meaning that the FEC must also have a low amount of overhead. Unfortunately, low overhead and high coding gain are generally conflicting trades, although recent work has shown that Turbo Product Codes (TPC) are a particularly attractive candidate. Computer simulations predict that very impressive gains in detection performance are possible for a relatively small increase in bandwidth. The main drawbacks are the additional complexity of the decoding circuitry and an increase in receive side latency. This paper presents the latest simulation and hardware performance results of PCM/FM, SOQPSK, and Multi-h CPM with TPC.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / It is widely recognized that telemetry channels, particularly airborne channels, are afflicted by multipath propagation effects. It has also been shown that adaptive equalization can be highly effective in mitigating these effects. However, numerous other factors influence the behavior of adaptive equalization, and the type of modulation employed is certainly one of these factors. This is particularly true on modulations that exhibit different operating bandwidths. Computer simulations using the Constant Modulus Algorithm (CMA) have recently been reported for PCM/FM, ARTM Tier 1 SOQPSK, and Tier II SOQPSK. These encouraging results have led to a hardware implementation of a CMA equalizer. This paper presents the latest results from this work.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 22-25, 2001 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Multi-h CPM has been selected as the Tier II waveform for the Advanced Range Telemetry (ARTM) program, because it offers 50% better spectral efficiency than Feher-patented FQPSK, which is the Tier I waveform. Shaped Offset QPSK has been shown to be nearly identical in performance to Feher-patented FQPSK. Both the Tier I and Tier II waveforms must operate in the presence of adjacent channel interference in order to meet the range community's telemetry requirements. This paper presents an experimental characterization of SOQPSK and Multi-h CPM in the presence of adjacent channel interference, over a range of channel spacings and differential signal amplitudes. Quantitative results are presented which demonstrate the relative robustness of the ARTM Tier I and Tier II waveforms, with adjacent channel interference representative of a typical range environment.

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / Multi-H Continuous Phase Modulation is a highly bandwidth efficient constant amplitude modulation scheme. Because of these qualities it was selected as the Advanced Range Telemetry (ARTM) tier II waveform. In the past, two demodulation techniques have widely been proposed, coherent detection and non-coherent detection. This paper presents a receiver design that implements a hybrid, partially coherent detection scheme that takes advantage of the positive aspects of both coherent and non-coherent detection. Because complete phase recovery is not required, the hybrid receiver performs better in environments with fast fading, strong phase noise, and multi path when compared to the traditional coherent receiver. The hybrid receiver can also acquire and reacquire signals much faster than conventional coherent receivers. The hybrid receiver design implements a partial carrier detection scheme that utilizes phase information that performs much better in AWGN environments than typical non-coherent receivers. Simulation results show that the hybrid receiver has low implementation loss compared to the optimal Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation (MLSE) receiver.

Continuous phase modulation~(CPM) is a non-linear, constant-envelope modulation scheme with memory, known for its bandwidth and power efficiency. Multi-h CPM uses multiple modulation indices in successive symbol intervals to improve the error performance as compared to single-h CPM~(basic CPM that utilizes only a single modulation index). One of the major applications of multi-h CPM is in aeronautical telemetry systems. Modern aeronautical devices host an increasing number of sensors, which can transmit flight testing data to the ground station. However, this excess data transfer increases the intersymbol interference, and thus channel equalization is required at the receiver. The objective of our research is to propose low-complexity frqeuency-domain equalization~(FDE) techniques for multi-h CPM waveforms. For a modulation scheme with memory, such as CPM, the cyclic constraint on the FDE block necessitates the use of an extra segment of symbols, called intrafix or tail segment. We have used very simple geometric arguments to derive upper and lower bounds on the length of the intrafix in terms of the parameters of the modulation scheme and the Frobenius number. It is concluded that the length of the intrafix for multi-h CPM schemes is typically shorter than those required for single-h modulation schemes. We propose two receiver architectures; one uses a matched filter front end, while the other utilizes a fractional sampling front end. Various simplifications are proposed for each architecture, and the trade-off between receiver complexity and performance is analyzed and verified through detailed simulation studies.