Tone calibration technique: A digital signaling scheme for mobile applications

Residual carrier modulation is conventionally used in a communication link to assist the receiver with signal demodulation and detection. Although suppressed carrier modulation has a slight power advantage over the residual carrier approach in systems enjoying a high level of stability, it lacks sufficient robustness to be used in channels severely contaminated by noise, interference and propagation effects. In mobile links, in particular, the vehicle motion and multipath waveform propagation affect the received carrier in an adverse fashion. A residual carrier scheme that uses a pilot carrier to calibrate a mobile channel against multipath fading anomalies is described. The benefits of this scheme, known as tone calibration technique, are described. A brief study of the system performance in the presence of implementation anomalies is also given.