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Commercial and military communications satellite systems must all be tested with a simulated path link that includes impairments precisely imitating conditions the system will encounter in service. dBm's SLE700 satellite link emulator is a system that establishes the link and provides the impairments, making it an essential element for testing Earth terminals and satellite payloads during system development and before deployment.

Evaluating a satellite system presents challenges found in no other communications application. In addition to the usual RF performance parameters, SATCOM systems experience variations in transmission path conditions that vary with the spacecraft's position in the sky and its type of orbit. This creates a unique set of operational parameters for every SATCOM system, and a corresponding need for dynamic test routines and equipment that can accurately emulate a link from uplink through the satellite's transponder to the downlink and back, and perhaps from transponder to transponder if hand-offs to multiple satellites are required to complete the link.

To achieve this, system integrators build large closed-loop ATE systems that perform hundreds of tests, and invariably require an instrument that can establish the communications link, that is "modulation format agnostic", and can add dynamically-varying impairments such as flat fading, phase shift, Doppler shift, and delay in the exact amounts that would occur in service.

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•Feature Article: Enhanced Satellite Link Emulator Simplifies Terminal And Payload Development