Performance of hybrid spread spectrum DS/FH RAKE receivers for troposcatter links at 5 GHz

Troposcatter radio links may be a low cost alternative for long distance communications, or when the transmitter and the receiver are separated by difficult terrain that prevent from line-of-sight communications. These links permit one to preserve satellite resources in the case of civil applications, so as to overcome geographical barriers (oceans, mountains, desert, etc.). They also can easily and rapidly be installed for emergency situations in both civil and military cases. They represent a good solution in the case of single transhorizon hops of length limited to several hundreds of kilometers. The problem is that the transmission is based on the presence of multipath, whose dispersion is very varying on long periods. Wide-band transmission schemes can be then employed, like OFDM or spread spectrum techniques. The limitations of OFDM in presence of non-linearities of the amplifiers has often led one to prefer spread spectrum techniques in the case of troposcatter links: direct sequence (DS) or frequency hopping (FH). All the more so as other characteristics of spread spectrum are exploited for performance and also discretion purposes, as we are concerned with military tactical transmissions. The implementation of hybrid DS/FH spread spectrum receivers, which realize a maximal ratio combination of the paths (RAKE) is presented. After a description of the channel, we then describe the communication systems involved, and finally estimate the bit error rate