A Versatile FPGA-Based Multi-Rate and Multi-Channel Transmission Loss Tester

Based on the field-programmable gate array (FP-GA) structure, a versatile transmission loss tester for wireless communications, especially satellite communications, is developed to obtain the bit error rate (BER) and transmission loss efficiently. The hardware of the tester can be treated as an integrated radio frequency (RF) transmission system with an embedded additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) module. The FPGA-based RF system can generate at most 10 independent channels (ICs) with multiple rolling factors. Multiple symbol rates from 2 Ksps to 34 Msps can be supported with an appropriate multistage up-sampling processing. Furthermore, at most 640 sub-channels can be generated with the help of poly-phase filter banks and a well-designed FPGA realization of quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modem. The precomputation and test results show that a high dynamic range of transmitting and receiving signal levels can be supported. In addition, the expected transmission loss at one specific BER can be easily observed and acquired with the help of an integrated automated monitoring software developed by Qt development tool.