Evaluation of 16 kbit/s digital voice transmission for mobile radio

In this paper 16 kbit/s digital voice transmission with conventional channel spacing of 25 kHz, employing a 16 kbit/s adaptive delta modulation (ADM) coder-decoder (CODEC) is evaluated. The main characteristics of narrow-band digital FM modulation schemes, such as tamed FM, Gaussian filtered minimum shift keying (GMSK), four-level FM and phase locked loop-quaternary phase shift keying (PLL-QPSK), are compared by laboratory tests. Digitized voice quality in a digital channel incorporating a 16 kbit/s ADM CODEC and GMSK coherent detection was compared with voice quality of a conventional analog FM channel. Bit error ratio (BER) performance is shown to depend primarily on demodulation schemes. Digital voice quality is inferior to that of analog voice with an opinion score difference of about 0.5 in fading environments. This kind of digital voice transmission will be applicable for those systems that require high security at an expense of speech quality.