A Robust and Scalable Harmonic Cancellation Digital Predistortion Technique for HF Transmitters

High frequency (HF) transmitter implemented with the multioctave broadband power amplifier (PA) enables long-distance communication and has strong survivability. However, it is faced with the problem of harmonics because of the nonlinearity of the PA. We first consider canceling the harmonics using a harmonic cancellation digital predistortion (HC-DPD) technique, instead of lossy and bulky analog filter banks. A uniform complex-valued Hilbert transform-based polynomial (HTBP) function is proposed for the modeling of the harmonics, as well as the fundamental component in the real-valued input and output signals. In order to validate this idea, detailed experiments were performed for carrier frequencies located at 5 and 10 MHz, respectively. After the proposed HC-DPD, the harmonics were all canceled to satisfy the linearization requirements. In particular, the improvement of the second harmonic is more than 40 dB, which is nearly 20 dB better than that of the memoryless polynomial (MLP) model. Furthermore, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique is scalable, in which the model coefficients extracted at a specific power level, signal bandwidth, and carrier frequency can be extended to other scenarios. Both the second and third harmonics were canceled for being below -45 dBc after the HC-DPD.