Satellite augmentation of cellular type mobile radio telephone systems

Abstract

NASA's ATS-6 satellite relayed voice bandwidth communications between five trucks and the trucking company dispatchers as the trucks traveled throughout the north-eastern quarter of the contiguous United States. The experiment, conducted over a seven month period, demonstrated that propagation characteristics are much different for the satellite-mobile links than for terrestrial-mobile links. A properly designed satellite system can provide high quality, reliable voice and data communications except where the vehicle-satellite path is shadowed by a structure or terrain feature. Mobile equipment in the experiment was adapted from commercial mobile radios. The vehicle antennas were 75 cm tall, 2 cm diam. Another experiment proved the feasibility of vehicle position surveillance using active two-way tone-code ranging through ATS-6 to provide one line of position and passive one-way ranging by measuring the time-of-arrival of a signal from an independent satellite. A position fix was printed out at an earth station 1 sec after it sent the interrogation signal to the distant vehicle, a towboat on the Mississippi River. The line of position from ATS-6 was accurate to 0.1 nautical mile using a voice bandwidth ranging signal. The line of position from the NOAA GOES satellite was accurate to 2 miles, using 100 Hz signal bandwidth. If the signal from the independent satellite had the same bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio as ATS-6, the fixes would have been accurate to about 0.1 nautical mile. A concept study concluded that satellites might be a cost effective augmentation of terrestrial cellular type mobile radio telephone systems. The satellites would serve thinly populated areas where terrestrial systems are not cost effective. In the United States, the satellites would serve about 90% of the land area where 20% of the population resides. A multibeam satellite with many channels in each beam would be compatible with the urban terrestrial systems and together they would provide a nearly ubiquitous mobile radio telephone service.