Dual-Channel X-Band Transmitter for Low Earth Orbit Satellites

In this paper, architecture and design aspects of a high data rate X-Band transmitter is discussed. The X-Band transmitter is used as a payload data downlink subsystem for an earth observation satellite with an altitude of 700 km. It has dual-channel structure and can support 160 Mb/s data rate per channel, and 320 Mb/s in total. The transmitter complies with CCSDS standards and is capable of performing concatenated channel coding which employs convolutional codes with rate (1/2) or (7/8) as inner code, and Reed-Solomon code with rate (223,255) as outer code to meet the bit error rate requirement of at most 1e-7.