Using forward error correction technique for microsatellite data broadcasting system

Abstract Due to fast growing uses of the microsatellite data broadcasting, the quality of data transmission has became a very important issue. As the improvement from frequency and modulation technique for amateur radio has widely been discussed, this paper explores the usage of the forward error correction technique, called convolutional coding, to incorporate with the transmission data stream for decreasing the broadcasting bit error rate. The transmitted data is decoded by the maximum likelihood decoding method, or called Viterbi algorithm, to enhance the broadcasting quality. After the employment of the convolutional coding, the results clearly show the increase of the transmission data volume due to its less redundancy and significant improvement of the bit error rate under a number of amateur radio frequency bands tested. This ascertains the merit of the present system applicable for use in the real harsh environmental data transmission.