A propagation measurement-based analysis of frequency hopping systems on VHF mobile fading channels

This paper is concerned with the analysis of slow frequency hopping (SFH) communication systems operating on mobile fading channels in the VHF band, with emphasis on the impact of propagation characteristics. An expression is developed for computing the FH channel time correlation function in terms of the channel frequency time correlation function and the hop sequence statistics. A simple correlation metric is then shown to be a good indication of the coded error rate performance. The approach taken represents an intuitive characterization of the frequency diversity provided by FH and allows the effect of important system parameters such as hop rate, operating bandwidth, and interleaver size to be easily evaluated. Results presented for two measured VHF channel transfer function time series illustrate the importance of the channel characteristics and choice of system parameters