Quantifying Coding Gain from Telemetry Data Combining

Abstract

A method for combining telemetry data and quantifying the resulting coding gain for a ballistic missile test flight is presented. Data received from five ground stations in 54 data files with 18 million intermittent frames is combined, to create a single file with 1.5 million continuous frames. Coding gain provided by data combining is as high as 30 dB, with a useful improvement of 5 dB at boost and terminal stages. With frame reconstruction techniques, erroneous words in a frame are reduced from 2.1% to 0.12 %.