Citation

Abstract

Telemetry signals received from the Voyager 2 spacecraft at Deep Space Stations at Parkes and Canberra, Australia, on February 6, 1986, were combined by the method of symbol stream combining. This second demonstration of symbol stream combining followed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) demonstration at Giacobini-Zinner encounter in September 1985. The Voyager demonstration was at a symbol rate of 43.2 ksymb/s, compared to 2 ksymb/s for ICE. Recording, playback, and combining at this higher rate were demonstrated, The average symbol signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the combined data was 2.84 dB, or 0.23 dB less than the sum of the SNRs of the two input symbol streams. This 0.23 loss from ideal combining was due to use of 4-bit quantization of the input symbol streams and imperfect scaling. A practical implementation with 8-bit quantization could achieve combining losses of under 0.05 dB over a wide dynamic range of input signal levels.

Details

Volume
42-86
Published
August 15, 1986
Pages
131–142
File Size
914.3 KB