On the characterization of the wireless channel for aeronautic mobile telemetry in C-band

In this paper, we present the use-case of an OFDM-based flight test telemetry link operating in C-band and give insight into a measurement campaign to characterize the wireless channel for aircraft-to-ground links. We present the equipment and algorithm used for the derivation of the channel spreading function. This function describes the impact of a channel on transmitted signals with respect to delay and Doppler spread. We disclose exemplary results that illustrate different channel characteristics for different operational scenarios of test aircraft. The utilization of the channel characteristics for an optimized parameterization of OFDM links and for data link validation using real-time channel emulation completes this study.