Measure a channel

[pfeatherstone]

How can I measure channel impairments given some hardware setup?
So I have a transmitter, receiver, antennae and I'm transmitting a simple BPSK over the air.
What types of signals and what algorithms can I run to measure the channel. For example:

• AWGN
• Phase jitter
• Time jitter
• Fading
• Doppler
• Multipath
• etc
  Are there DSP methods for doing this?
  Or do I have to make an assumption on the channel impairment algorithms, collect all their parameters (un-initialized), then run some global optimizer using some RF captures as ground truth data?
  Any ideas?

[jgaeddert]

Great questions. Currently the symtrack family of objects perform correction for many of these channel impairments, but don't provide measurements for these directly. I'd be interested in re-vectoring that object with new APIs that provide access to those measurements.

A few questions:

• is your BPSK signal continuous or bursty?
• does your BPSK signal have pilots or a synchronization word? or just random bits?

[pfeatherstone]

Those things probably have different names in different books. I'll dig some references out. But you see my point. Depending on the system impairment or hardware impairment you're trying to measure, different signals, tones or whatever are needed. I'm keen to know what signals to use and what are the tests. Cheers

[jgaeddert]

@pfeatherstone did you ever find those references?

[pfeatherstone]

Oh I completely forgot. I'll try remember.

[pfeatherstone]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeson%27s_equation talks of corner frequency. I'll try find a source that mentions flicker frequency. I'm pretty sure I'm not going mad

[pfeatherstone]

This also talks about this https://www.ieee.li/pdf/essay/phase_noise_basics.pdf