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AssigneeGlowlink Communications Technology, Inc.
InventorsJeffrey C. Chu, Michael L. Downey, Robert W. Estus
Estimating the term…
A method and apparatus for monitoring and controlling the operating point of a satellite transponder amplifier. In one aspect of the invention, a time domain signal received at a ground station is digitally sampled. Then, a histogram of the received signal is computed. To form the histogram, the digital samples are categorized according to which of a plurality of amplitude ranges each sample falls within. When plotted as a graph, the number of occurrences within each amplitude range forms the histogram. Under low compression levels, the histogram generally appears as an approximately bell-shaped curve. However, under higher compression levels, the bell-shaped curve becomes distorted. By correlating the acquired histogram to a template histogram, an amount of compression can be determined. This amount of compression indicates the operating point of the transponder amplifiers. If desired, the transmission power levels used by the satellite can be adjusted to ensure that the amplifiers operate at desired levels of compression. The invention has an advantage over prior techniques in that the operating point of the transponder amplifiers can be more accurately determined. As such, the operating point can be more precisely adjusted.
A method for determining a level of gain compression in a wireless transmitted signal, the method implemented by communications equipment and comprising steps of:
A system for determining a level of gain compression in a transmitted signal comprising communications equipment that controls gain of the transmitted signal in a closed link power control loop based on received signal quality and in which a histogram is computed from a received wireless transmitted signal and the computed histogram is correlated to a template histogram to determine the level of gain compression in the wireless transmitted signal, wherein the communications equipment inhibits further gain compression based on the amount of gain compression thereby inhibiting signal quality deterioration caused by gain compression.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.