A location reporting paging communication system comprising space satellites, ground stations and a remote receiving unit adapted to resolve a global position from signals transmitted from a communication transmitter. The subscriber in possession of the remote receiving unit updates the paging network with global positioning information. A caller paging a subscriber in possession of the remote receiving unit may request the global location of the remote receiving unit. The paging network could divulge or block such information from a caller depending on the requirements of the subscriber.

Location reporting satellite paging system with optional blocking of location reporting

A satellite communications system, which is inherently power limited, employing spread spectrum techniques in order to trade-off bandwidth for small ground station antennas. In a one-way system embodiment a central station transmits data to a satellite for relay to a large number of small antenna receiving stations, the transmissions being spread spectrum encoded with spreading code lengths selected to provide adequate data recovery at the least sensitive station to which the transmissions are directed. Spreading codes may also function to address particular stations. In a two-way system embodiment, the central station additionally functions as a terrestrial relay station. A plurality of small antenna transmitting stations, at least one of which may be at the same site as a receiving station, transmit code division multiplexed data via the satellite to the central relay station using sufficiently long and distinct spreading codes as to permit adequate data error rates and to distinguish the transmissions of the various stations. The central relay station reformats the received data for retransmission to the satellite for relay to the receiving stations.

Satellite communications system and apparatus

A system for data communication between ground stations using an orbiting satellite as a relay includes a technique for avoiding the loss of signals from the satellite during periods of heavy precipitation. Data is communicated from an orbiting satellite to a plurality of earth stations on a single transmission frequency. The data is communicated on two separate transmission channels on that one frequency by using orthogonal channels of a coherent phase quadrature transmission system. The overall data rate on one of the two transmission channels is much lower than the overall data rate on the other of the two channels. The data on the lower data rate channel is less likely to be affected by heavy precipitation occurring in the line of sight between the satellite and the ground station, and the lower data rate channel is thus used to communicate data to a ground station located in an area of heavy precipitation. The lower data rate channel is further used to maintain phase synchronization so that the probability of losing phase synchronization with the signal transmitted by the satellite is significantly reduced.

Technique for mitigating rain fading in a satellite communications system using quadrature phase shift keying

A 'direct' approach to obtain statistics of the code acquisition time for serial-search spread-spectrum receivers is presented, which combines the idea of algebraic characterization of the search with transform domain methods. This is a very general unified technique, yielding many other known results as special cases. One of the major advantages of the direct approach is that the effect of the search strategy on moments of the acquisition times can be isolated from the effect of the detection/verification logic. This fact will permit one both to analyze all known search strategies-confirming several conclusions regarding their comparative performance-and to propose two novel strategies (alternate search) which outperform the conventional ones when the code rewinding time is small in comparison to the dwell times. Optimum search strategy based on the maximum a posteriori criterion (MAP) is analyzed, thus ensuring an absolute and uniform basis of comparison. The two new strategies perform well by this measure. >

Analysis of strategies for serial-search spread-spectrum code acquisition-direct approach

Serial search spread-spectrum code acquisition is analyzed. A modified flow graph is presented. It permits the use of a generalized lock strategy and allows the false alarm time to be treated as a random variable. The distribution of acquisition time is obtained directly by using an extended generalization of Bernoulli trials. Compared to recent work which uses a fixed penalty false alarm time, the analysis is more general and requires fewer assumptions and approximations. The analysis is suitable for both single dwell and multidwell systems. Examples are presented to show the effect on the acquisition time distribution of sequence length and normalized detection threshold. >

Acquisition time distribution for spread-spectrum receivers

The spread spectrum acquisition and tracking performance for the Shuttle S -band and Ku -band communication links are analyzed and compared to test results. The S -band link requirements are more severe than those of the Ku -band links, hence, different despreader designs were developed for the two systems. The S -band despreader acquires pseudonoise code lock by examining all possible code phases in half chip steps while the Ku -band despreader acquires pseudonoise code lock by continuously sweeping a tau-jitter loop. Both despreaders employ a tau-jitter loop for code tracking. The code tracking performance is computed for the tau-jitter loop and compared to that of the more complex delay lock loop.

J. Holmes

Papers

Spread Spectrum Acquisition and Tracking Performance for Shuttle Communication Links