Analysis of a Spread-Spectrum Multiple-Access System with a Hard Limiter

The detectability parameter (signal-to-noise ratio) at the output of a correlation detector is computed when the input is the hard-limited sum of a number of pseudonoise (PN) carriers plus noise. All pseudonoise carriers have the same amplitude and center frequency, but are phase modulated with different PN codes and have independent phase angles. The detectability parameter depends on the repeater bandwidth, the maximum number of channels, the number of active channels, the received signal-to-noise ratio, and the peak of the in- and out-of-phase cross correlations of the PN sequences.