Citation
Abstract
Recently, there has been a substantial effort to increase the amount of data that can be received from outer planet missions by coherently combining signals from ground antennas in such a way as to increase the total effective aperture of the receiving system. However, as these signals become weaker, the baseband arraying technique in current use degrades somewhat due to carrier jitter. One solution to this problem is Sideband-Aided Receiver Arraying (SARA), In SARA, sidebands demodulated to baseband in a master receiver at the largest antenna are used to allow slave receivers in the other antennas to track the sideband power in the signal rather than the carrier power. The already existing receivers can be used in the slaves to track and demodulate the signals in either a residual carrier or a suppressed carrier environment. The resultant baseband signals from all the antennas can then be combined using existing baseband combining equipment. Computer simulations of SARA show increases in throughput (measured in data bits per second) over baseband-only combining of 17% at Voyager 2 Uranus encounter and 31% at Neptune for a four-element antenna array and (7, 1/2) convolutional coding.
Details
- Volume
- 42-67
- Published
- February 15, 1982
- Pages
- 39–53
- File Size
- 906.3 KB