BANDWIDTH LIMITED 320 MBPS TRANSMITTER

Abstract

With every new spacecraft that is designed comes a greater density of information that will be stored once it is in operation. This, coupled with the desire to reduce the number of ground stations needed to download this information from the spacecraft, places new requirements on telemetry transmitters. These new transmitters must be capable of data rates of 320 Mbps and beyond. Although the necessary bandwidth is available for some non-bandwidth-limited transmissions in Ka-Band and above, many systems will continue to rely on more narrow allocations down to X-Band. These systems will require filtering of the modulation to meet spectral limits. The usual requirements of this filtering also include that it not introduce high levels of inter-symbol interference (ISI) to the transmission. These constraints have been addressed at CE by implementing a DSP technique that pre-filters a QPSK symbol set to achieve bandwidth-limited 320 Mbps operation. This implementation operates within the speed range of the radiation-hardened digital technologies that are currently available and consumes less power than the traditional high-speed FIR techniques.