An adaptive antenna array for future land mobile satellite terminals

A unified approach to adaptive antenna array design and transceiver signal processing architectures is proposed for the user segment of the land mobile satellite communications service. This novel technique is described in its conceptual form, and compared with steered antenna array configurations currently favoured for this class of mobile communication system. The proposed system employs established diversity combining techniques previously developed for mobile terrestrial radio. It is suggested that a diversity based receiver architecture would allow the coherent recombination of the multipath signal energy present at the mobile terminal site, and thereby enhance system performance for a given link budget. Further, it is recommended that this processing can be most simply achieved if a pilot-based modulation format is utilised, and near instantaneous adaptation to the multipath energy if feedforward signal regeneration techniques are employed in the receiver