PAGE CONTENTS
Objectives
New communication and broadcasting systems use a high level of diversity to increase the service availability. For example time diversity/time interleaving offers a high gain for mobile reception, whereas diversity solves the “flat fading problem” for stationary reception. Combining the technologies requires a detailed characterisation of the propagation characteristics to evaluate the overall gain.
The channel measurement equipment (CME) is a flexible test receiver designed for multiple applications in the context of statistical analysis of the QoS and coverage of satellite and terrestrial communication systems like:
- Analysis of the QoS for mobile satellite systems (e.g. DVB-SH, ESDR, SDARS, future broadband systems),
- Verification of the coverage of terrestrial repeaters,
- Analysis of antenna subsystems in the field (e.g. antenna diversity gain, comparison of different antennas).
Challenges
The key issue is to provide a flexible measurement equipment that offers a complete tool chain for:
- LMS-channel characterization
- Antenna comparison in the field
- Analysis of antenna diversity effects
- Network validation and prediction
- RF-Frontend qualification
Plan
The major milestones of the project are:
- Baseline Design Review: October 29th, 2008
- Midterm Design Review: September 17th, 2009
- Field testing and validation: November 2009 to February 2010
- Final Review: July 28th, 2010
- Final Presentation: September 9th, 2010
Current Status
Tasks completed:
- Definition work
- System design
- CMEC hardware design
- AA hardware design
- Review of system and hardware design
- CMEC hardware integration
- Implementation of system-framework
- Validation of system-framework
- Integration of AA hardware (1st prototype)
- Validation of data processing subsystems (lab tests)
- First field-validation campaign
- Design of 2nd generation tuners for AA
- Integration of 2nd generation tuners for AA
- Second field-validation campaign
- Implementation of post-processing features
- EMC conformance validation