Practical wideband channel sounding system for air-to-ground measurements at C Band

This paper reports a practical design and construction of a wideband channel sounding system for air-to-ground measurements at C band. A high precision Global Positioning System (GPS) time-stamped system is developed using the virtual instrument (VI) concept. With the implementations of the spread spectrum technique and through matched filter detection, the performance of the designed sounding system is analyzed. Extensive laboratory test is performed and there is good agreement between experimental and theoretical results.