FQPSK: A BANDWIDTH AND RF POWER EFFICIENT TECHNOLOGY FOR TELEMETRY APPLICATIONS

Abstract

A simple, low cost radio frequency (RF) power and spectrally efficient integrated transceiver/modem architecture employing Feher’s patented Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (FQPSK) is described. The FQPSK signals presented in this paper are obtained by using additional post low-pass filters in the FQPSK architecture. This implementation significantly improves the spectral efficiency of the worldwide commercially standardized Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying (GMSK) systems. The Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of FQPSK in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel has been investigated by means of computer simulation and hardware prototype measurements. The results of the hardware and software simulations are compared to GMSK and QPSK/OQPSK performance. These results show that the filtered FQPSK modulated signal passing through a non-linear amplifier (NLA) can achieve a spectral efficiency improvement of about 60% over NLA filtered OQPSK and an integrated spectral efficiency improvement of 50% over GMSK and a better BER performance. In particular, 100 kb/s to 34 Mb/s hardware experimental results over 2.4 GHz NLA (saturated) 1 Watt system confirmed that FQPSK hardware systems attain a BER=f(Eb/N0) performance within 1 dB to 2 dB of predicted theoretical results.