Field tests of a spread spectrum land mobile satellite communicationsystem using ETS-V satellite

The performance of a Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum Communication system in actual land mobile satellite channel is evaluated with experiments. Field test results in L-band with the ETS-V satellite are presented, in which the use of a multi-bitquantized Coherent Matched Filter receiver improves the initial acquisition and the bit error rate performances. The BER characteristics in urban and suburban environments are found to agree with that of nonSS BPSK on a non-selective Rician fading channel.