Citation
Abstract
Antenna arraying is coherently adding individually received signals from different receiving stations to improve telemetry performance. The array configuration of the current DSN Network Consolidation Project (NCP) will consist of a 64-meter station and three 34-meter stations. This article examines the effect of noisy carrier reference on telemetry link performance in this NCP configuration when individually received signals are combined at baseband. This imperfect carrier reference causes a degradation in detection performance _ in coherent communication systems. A measure of this degradation is the radio loss, which is the amount of increase in data signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) per bit required to achieve the same bit error rate when carrier reference is perfect. Performance analysis and numerical results are obtained for the Voyager high rate telemetry link with maximum likelihood convolutional decoding. The arraying of antennas provides not only improved performance due to an increase in effective antenna aperture, but also a decrease in radio loss with respect to a single antenna. This telemetry link performance improvement is a function of the carrier loop SNR and data bit error rate. When the carrier loop SNR’s are low, it provides a significant improvement in the telemetry link performance since the decrease in radio loss with respect to a single station is substantial.
Details
- Volume
- 42-63
- Published
- June 15, 1981
- Pages
- 128–135
- File Size
- 410.3 KB