Multipath Mitigation for Aeronautical Telemetry with Multiple Antennas

Abstract

Frequency selective multipath is a key performance limiter for aeronautical telemetry applications. Our research explores multipath mitigation techniques with ARTM Tier-1 waveforms using linear adaptive filters, multiple receive antennas and error-based best source selection. Single antenna adaptive equalization alone is unable to substantially improve performance under certain channel conditions. Analytical investigations demonstrate that nonlinear channel phase response is the principal cause of performance loss. In this adverse environment, spatial diversity with multiple receive antennas along with error-based best source selection are capable of improving bit error rate performance by 5dB for each additional antenna.