Burst error characteristics of narrowband digital systems in land mobile radio

In digital mobile radio systems the transmission errors caused by multipath fading are bursty. Therefore, to design and evaluate the performance of forward error-correction (FEC) techniques, the statistical characteristics of the error patterns must be analyzed. This paper presents some of such analyses with reference to a 900 MHz band mobile radio system in urban environment, using a narrowband modulation technique of the class 12PM3, with frequency discriminator detection. The regeneration is performed by either a simple hard decision technique or a maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) technique. The transmission error statistics are presented according to two different definitions.