This paper presents the performance of a pseudoerror monitoring technique for a 16 QAM 140 Mbit/s digital radio in presence of multipath dispersive fading. The so-called pseudoerrors, generated by means of a threshold modification of two, namely, secondary receivers are entered into an extrapolating function to obtain a fast bit error ratio (BER) calculation. A counting time of 10 ms was retained in order to follow fading depth changes up to 100 dB/s and fading notch speeds up to 300 MHz/s approximately. We have considered three structures for the receiver: without equalization, with IF amplitude equalization, and decision feedback equalization (DFE). The results obtained show the estimated and real BER within a margin that includes the two recommended CCIR values: 10^-3and10^-6. In particular, the estimated signature obtained in the case of using IF equalization reveals that this fast BER calculation could be an effective choice to control a frequency diversity switch, even in the presence of a fading activity with rapid variations.

Peer Reviewed