Hardware simulator assists mobile satellite experiment

To develop ground equipment that lends itself to the mobile satellite peculiarities, a hardware channel simulator is designed and implemented for NASA'S mobile satellite experiment. The simulator has been designed to handle the digital and analog signaling techniques of interest of phase, frequency, and amplitude modulation type. This paper first describes the architecture of the simulator, with emphasis on the propagation path simulator. Next, the capabilities of the simulator are demonstrated via various experiments which include fading and technology development.