Harry Ordway (HHI) presented the talk titled “Power and spectrum efficiencies of an optical satellite uplink with spatially diverse beams and incoherent combining” at 2020 International Conference on Space Optics (ICSO) that took place as a virtual event.
Paper abstract:
Existing radio-based satellite up- and downlinks are reaching their limits in terms of transmission rate. In order to enable higher data rates, optical links are being researched and developed. On ground, spatially displaced multi-aperture systems using different wavelengths can mitigate atmospheric scintillation and increase the uplink transmit power. A four-aperture free-space optical communication system was demonstrated at Fraunhofer HHI over a bidirectional link. For the representative uplink, each array aperture sent a beam carrying the same data but over a different wavelength to avoid inter-beam interferences. At the receiver, the combined signals are optically amplified, optically filtered, incoherently photodetected and electrically filtered. Signal path delays are pre-compensated on the ground-station site. This system shall be scaled up for a long-range demonstration within the EU-funded H2020-project VERTIGO. In this paper, we investigate the performance and scalability of this uplink configuration
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