Design of integrated Mode S Transponder, ADS-B and Distance Measuring Equipment transceivers

This work is devoted to the design of an analog transceiver for the Aeronautical Radio Navigation Services band (960 to 1215 MHz) as a required step to the exploitation of the Software Defined Radio concept in avionics. The integration of all the equipment operating in this band into a single piece of reprogrammable hardware minimizes the size, weight, power and cost (the so-called SWaP-C requirements) of avionic equipment, as well as it enables easy and fast transition towards a modernization of the Communications, Navigation and Surveillance standards. The main challenges of the design are: To provide the receiver with the dynamic range required by the Minimum Operational Performance Standards; to minimize the SWaP-C requirements by sharing a single High Power Amplifier for all the services specified in the title; and to establish a suitable duplexing technique that allows all the services to meet their operational goals. Along with this design, an operational study of the proposed multiplexing/duplexing schemes is carried out through software simulation, proving the feasibility of the proposed schemes and a small impact on the systems' capabilities.