Low data rate on-board demultiplexing and demodulation for business services communication satellites

Certain design and implementation problems related to space-borne multicarrier (or group) demodulation (MCD) of a large number of low-to-moderate data rate signals (137 kb/s to 4.369 Mb/s), relevant to business services exchanged via (regenerative) FDMA (uplink)/TDM (downlink) communication satellites, are discussed. Emphasis is given to MCDs utilizing chirp Fourier transform (CFT) processors, displaying an interesting mix of analog and digital signal processing. Mass/DC power budgets for some representative data rates are indicated, and a comparison is made with some alternative MCD technologies.<
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