Performance evaluation of large aperture “polished panel” optical receivers based on experimental data

Recent interest in the development of hybrid RF/Optical communications has led to the installation of a “polished-panel” optical receiver evaluation assembly on the 34-meter research antenna at Deep-Space Station 13 (DSS-13) at NASA´s Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex¹. The test setup consists of a custom aluminum panel polished to optical smoothness, and a large-sensor CCD camera designed to image the point-spread function (PSF) generated by the polished aluminum panel. Extensive data has been obtained via real-time tracking and imaging of planets and stars at DSS-13. Both “on-source” and “off-source” data were recorded at various elevations, enabling the development of realistic simulations and analytic models to help determine the performance of future deep-space communications systems operating with on-off keying (OOK) or pulse-position-modulated (PPM) signaling formats, and compared with the ultimate quantum bound on detection performance. Experimentally determined PSFs were scaled to provide realistic signal-distributions across a photon-counting detector array when a pulse is received, and uncoded as well as block-coded performance analyzed and evaluated for a well-known class of block codes.