Quality estimation of PSK modulated signals

The use of the Ka band (30/20 GHz) for satellite communication systems raises the problem of dealing with rain attenuation. A very important problem in fade countermeasure systems is the need to detect signal quality quickly and accurately. In fact, the countermeasure has to be initiated before the signal degradation effect an the bit error rate is detected by the user. This article presents an overview of different methods to evaluate signal quality, which are based on the availability of soft quantized levels of PSK demodulated signals at the receiver. It is shown that this class of methods has a good theoretical performance. Also, an innovative procedure is presented which adapts one of the methods to some existing hardware, and tunes up a set of parameters in order to compensate for the fact that the hardware is to same extent impaired.