Research Projects

Aeronautical telemetry is the process of transmitting measurements wirelessly from an airborne test article to a ground-based receiver. It is a critical service for flight test missions, in which a ground station monitors the data collected from the aircraft in real time to assess the performance and safety of the flight. Thus, the reliability and efficiency of the RF link is highly important. Aeronautical telemetry is generally implemented with continuous phase modulations (CPM) because they are constant envelope and spectrally efficient. As spectrum reallocations have reduced the spectrum available for aeronautical telemetry, spectrally efficient alternatives have been adopted in the aeronautical telemetry standard IRIG 106. On any given day, there may be flight tests using one of three different modulations. An interesting problem is automatic modulation recognition – the ability to determine the modulation without any information besides the signal itself. While there are good techniques for automatic modulation recognition for linear single carrier modulations, this problem is notoriously hard for CPM.