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Software Defined Radio for Maritime Collision Avoidance Applications

The design and development of a software defined radio (SDR) receiver prototype has been completed. The goal is to replace the existing automatic identification system (AIS) manufactured by Vesper Marine with a software driven system that reduces costs and provides a high
degree of reconfigurability. One of the key concepts of the SDR is the consideration of directly digitizing the radio frequency (RF) signal using subsampling. This idea arises from the ambition to implement an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) as close to the antenna interface as
practically possible. Thus, majority of the RF processing is encapsulated within in the digital domain. Evaluation of a frequency planning strategy that utilizes a combination of subsampling and oversampling will illustrate how the maritime bandwidth is aliased to a lower frequency. An analog front-end (AFE) board was constructed to implement the frequency planning strategy so that the digitized bandwidth can be streamed into a field programmable gate array (FPGA)
for real-time processing. Research is shown on digital front-end (DFE) techniques that condition the digitized maritime signal for baseband processing. The process of a digital down converter (DDC) is conducted by an FPGA, which acquired the in-phase and quadrature signals. By implementing a digital signal processor (DSP) for baseband processing, demodulation on an AIS test signal is evaluated. The SDR prototype achieved a receiver sensitivity of -113dBm, outperforming the required sensitivity of -107dBm specified in the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 62287-1 standard for AIS applications [1].

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:canterbury.ac.nz/oai:ir.canterbury.ac.nz:10092/11217
Date January 2015
CreatorsHumphris, Les
PublisherUniversity of Canterbury. Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Source SetsUniversity of Canterbury
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic thesis or dissertation, Text
RightsCopyright Les Humphris, http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/thesis/etheses_copyright.shtml
RelationNZCU

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