Performance measurements for a laboratory-simulated 30/20 GHz communication satellite transponder

NASA has developed a digital satellite communications system simulator and test bed facility, known as the SITE (System Integratrion, Test and Evaluation) Project. The purpose of the facility is to evaluate satellite system components, develop and verify system concepts, and perform satellite system experiments. A recently completed set of experiments measured the performance of the 30/20 GHz satellite transponder portion of the system in terms of RF parameters and high rate digital data transmission. The results of these tests indicate the quality of data transmission which can be obtained under various transponder operating conditions, as well as the relative effects of degraded RF performance on the bit-error rate (BER) of transmitted data.