Error Rate Performance of Equatorial HF Skywave MIMO Packet Radio

The use of High Frequency (HF) channels equipped with data-link protocols for the process of sending data has proven to be useful for communication systems in remote areas. However, the HF channel has propagation conditions that tend to be unstable, therefore a Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system is needed to be able to increase the capacity of the HF channel by utilizing the wave bending in the ionosphere layer that forms two wave modes, namely Ordinary (O) waves and Extraordinary (X) waves. The two waves have orthogonal polarizations, making them suitable to be applied to MIMO systems. In this paper, we utilize a MIMO 2×2 system to maximize the ability of the HF channel and use the third generation of Automatic Link Establishment (ALE) data-link protocol which is equipped with double layer error coding in the form of Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) and Convolutional Code (CC). The MIMO 2×2 system will be compared with the Single Input Single Output system to see the increase in channel capacity. From these results, the addition of a MIMO 2×2 system and the third generation of ALE proved to increase the channel capacity and protect the data from errors due to disturbances during the transmission process through the HF channel.