International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 18-21, 2004 / Town & Country Resort, San Diego, California / Multipath propagation consisting largely of specular reflection components is known to be the major channel impairment in many aeronautical mobile telemetry (AMT) applications. Adaptive equalizers are not effective against flat fading commonly created by strong power delay profile components representing small fractions of the transmitted symbol period. Avoidance and diversity techniques are the only practical means of combating this problem. A new post-detection, no-hit diversity branch selector is described in this paper. Laboratory and limited flight test data comparing non-diversity, selection diversity and intermediate frequency (IF) combining techniques are presented.

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.