Design and Implementation of a Multi-Mode Telemetry Transmitter

In space applications, the required levels of performance and reliability drive up hardware costs. Reducing the efforts related to device development and validation may help balance the budget. A versatile transmitter for space telemetry is implemented here that may help in this respect. Such a device can switch across different linear and continuous phase modulation schemes just by modifying its parameters, while maintaining the same hardware structure. Results from an extensive campaign of experimental test measurements of the device are reported. A GNURadio-implemented receiver is developed to test performance of the actual transmitter by considering all the main blocks of the receiver chain and computing the bit error rate (BER) at the receiver. After testing different configurations, results confirm that the BER of the improved one-filter modulated signal is lower than the BER obtained using only the first Laurent decomposition component.