Significant performance improvement in polarization-diversity GMSK reception using atypical filters

Kiss, Ádám and Schäffer, László (2025) Significant performance improvement in polarization-diversity GMSK reception using atypical filters. INFOCOMMUNICATIONS JOURNAL, 17 (4). pp. 26-31. ISSN 2061-2079

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Abstract

This paper presents novel signal processing methods to enhance the reception performance of Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying (GMSK) signals from pico- and nanosatellites, emphasizing software-defined approaches over hardware upgrades. Atypical filtering techniques, including phase-domain median and FIR filtering, as well as polarization-diverse multi-channel methods, are explored and evaluated. Real-world experiments were conducted using coherently sampled dual-polarization channels from a ground station in Szeged, Hungary, receiving transmissions from the MRC-100 satellite. Various single- and multichannel preprocessing strategies were benchmarked using packet decoding success and bit-error rates. Results show that nonlinear phase filtering and blind source separation techniques, notably FastICA, significantly increase the number of correctly decoded packets – achieving up to a 16% improvement compared to conventional demodulation without preprocessing. This study demonstrates the utility and relative independence of these methods and highlights their potential for improving satellite data throughput with no hardware modification. These techniques are suitable for integration into existing ground stations to enhance data reception performance.

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