Performance degradation of the Block IV telemetry system due to the presence of a CW interference

The presence of an in-band continuous wave interference can seriously degrade the performance of a telemetry system. Degradation effects for a phase shift keying (PSK) system can be found in Refs. 1 and 2. The telemetry system employed for deep space communications is a binary phase-shift keying system (BPSK) with squarewave subcarriers. The use of squarewave subcarriers makes the system less sensitive to in-band interference than a system using sinusoidal subcarriers. A model that allows one to predict the telemetry degradation for the deep space telemetry system is presented and backed with experimental data.