The Effect of a Bandpass Nonlinearity on Signal Detectability

When an angle-modulated signal plus noise constitute the input to a bandpass device exhibiting a nonlinear input-output power characteristic and AM to PM conversion, the noise component of the output has altered first- and second-order statistics. A method of evaluating the two-dimensional first-order statistics of this noise is presented. The effect on signal detectability of a nonlinearity inserted between two channel noise sources is studied; expressions for the mean square received phase error and probability of error (for coherent digital phase modulation) are derived. The hard limiting satellite channel, with Gaussian noise on the up and down links, is examined in detail, and it is demonstrated that the limiter can significantly affect signal detectability.