A Spread-Spectrum Concept Combining Chirp Modulation and Pseudonoise Coding

This paper investigates the combination of chirp modulation and pseudonoise phase shift keying for spread-spectrum transmission of digital data. Data encoding is accomplished by assignment of positive and negative dispersive slope chirps for binary ones and zeros. Each chirp is then modulated by one period of a PN signature sequence. The performance in additive white Gaussian noise is analyzed, measures of performance being mean acquisition time, mean hold-in time, and bit error probability. Calculated and experimental results are presented for a 105 kbit/s modem. In the test system, SAW dispersive delay lines with a bandwidth of 16.4 MHz and 9.5 μs dispersion time serve for the key operations of chirp generation and pulse compression, and the signature codes are 127 bit -sequences.