SIMULATION OF THE CANADIAN GOES SIGNAL PROCESSOR.

An international experiment is being conducted to assess the use of geostationary spacecraft to relay 406-MHz distress beacon signals. The development is described of a signal processor that will search a nominal 10-kHz portion of the 406-MHz band, detect and demodulate a small number of beacons, and produce an alert message with low probability of message error. It is shown that the nominal composite link carrier-to-noise signal spectral density ratio is about 30 dB-Hz. The proposed processor is described and simulation results are presented. The results indicate that the processor has a threshold of about 26 dB-Hz, a message error rate of 2% or less, and a message transfer time of less than 10 min.