High efficiency power amplifier design for mobile satellite earth stations

Mobile transmitters demand power amplifiers that are highly power efficient, and, to improve spectral efficiency, are also linear. Linearisation of high-efficiency amplifiers has the potential to fulfil both these requirements in the narrowband case. Wideband linearisation techniques, such as feedforward and analogue predistortion have significant problems which, at present, limit their application for handheld use. The paper presents techniques to improve the attractiveness of feedforward linearisation in the satellite and mobile environments, and suggests the use of a combined feedforward and predistortion amplifier to achieve good performance in terms of linearity and power efficiency