LINK AVAILABILITY AND BIT ERROR CLUSTERS IN AERONAUTICAL TELEMETRY

Abstract

Radio frequency power margins in well planned line-of-sight (LOS) air-to-ground digital data transmission systems usually produce signal to noise ratios (SNR) that can deliver error free service. Sometimes field performance falls short of design and customer expectations. Recent flight tests conducted by the tri-service Advanced Range Telemetry (ARTM) project confirm that the dominant source of bit errors and short term link failures are “clusters” of severe error burst activity produced by flat fading, dispersive fading and poor antenna patterns on airborne vehicles. This paper introduces the techniques used by ARTM to measure bit error performance of aeronautical telemetry links.