Non-Intrusive Flexible Measurement for the Amplitude Response of Wideband Transponders

In this paper we propose a new measurement procedure for the amplitude response of a wideband transponder in an in-orbit testing (IOT) context. The proposed procedure resorts to a direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) technique in order to limit the interference caused by the measurement signals to the traffic. Further, an adaptive approach exploiting the knowledge of the inband traffic power has been introduced. Such knowledge, acquired either a priori or by sensing the channel, allows to easily design measurement signals satisfying multiple performance requirements (i.e., accuracy, resolution, interference, duration, and complexity). The proposed procedure can be used as a design tool to optimize the dimensioning of the IOT system parameters, and to flexibly trade off a performance indicator against another.