The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 27, 2010
Filed:
Mar. 10, 2009
Andrew L. Strodtbeck, Marina del Rey, CA (US);
Jennifer Vollbrecht, Torrance, CA (US);
Todd G. Ellenberger, Torrance, CA (US);
Andrew L. Strodtbeck, Marina del Rey, CA (US);
Jennifer Vollbrecht, Torrance, CA (US);
Todd G. Ellenberger, Torrance, CA (US);
The Boeing Company, Chicago, IL (US);
Abstract
A communication system employing site diversity combing to increase link availability includes at least two receivers at receive sites within a single downlink beam separated by enough distance to provide decorrelation of weather phenomena—such as rain fade outages. A signal transmits digital symbols to all the receivers and may use bandwidth efficient modulation with forward error correction coding. Sampled symbol values for each codeword are produced at each receiver, which are connected by one or more ground links so that all data can be collected at one site. At least two different soft-decision computation modules translate the sampled symbol values from the different receivers into different sets of soft-decision values—which may be log-likelihood-ratio (LLR) values reflecting the probability value for each bit of the codeword—that are digitally synchronized and combined for use by a decoder. The technique thus avoids disadvantages of either coherent waveform combining or BER-based digital switching.