Experimental earth station for satellite communication

The paper describes briefly the experimental earth station for the Symphonie satellite communication, built in order to test the new digital speech modulation system for telephone communication, the so-called Delta Modulation Single Channel per Carrier system. The station is equipped with two telephone channels connected in a single loop via the satellite. The data stream of 32 kbit/sec of the DCDM encoder modulates the intermediate frequency and radio frequency wavelength by 4-phase PSK. The transmit frequency band is 5.9-6.4 GHz and the receive band is 3.7-4.2 GHz. A signal-to-noise ratio of 13 dB, causing a bit error rate of 0.0001, provides high quality communication.