42 www.rfdesign.com April 2004
Air & Space Electronics
Simulation and realization of baseband pulse
shaping filter for BPSK modulator
This pulse shaping technique reduces side lobe levels of bi-phase shift
keying (BPSK) modulation and spectral spike elimination. Useful for space
communications, the technique can be implemented in a practical way.
This technique will be used in GEO satellites in the near future.
By D.Venkata Ramana, Surendra Pal and A.P.Shiva Prasad
ith the continuing growth of
Wcommunications and the in-
creasing number of users, frequency
bands are becoming more and more
congested. To cope with this fre-
quency congestion, many authors have
studied methods to increase bandwidth
use [1,2].
Significant RF spectrum limiting
can be obtained in three ways. Here,
the location of filter plays a key role.
The various locations include:
● filter after power amplification.
● filter at intermediate frequency
(IF).
● filter at baseband.
Post power amplifier (PA) filtering
is attractive to spectrum managers because
all unwanted emissions, which are outside
the filter’s passband, are eliminated. Theo-
retically this filter location provides maxi-
mum control over emissions.
However, it would be difficult for post PA
filtering to improve RF spectrum use in most
space missions. Filters can be either stripline
or waveguide bandpass filters, which are gen-
erally used in microwave applications. For
reasonable insertion losses, such filters
are constrained to bandwidths ranging from
1.5% - 2% of the transmitted frequency. It
should be noted that the filters that
have somewhat lower insertion loss
tend to be large and heavy.
Filtering at IF is attrac-
tive because the filter
operates at low power lev-
els and does not reduce
transmitted RF power. It
is also small and light-
weight and does not in-
troduce the spectral spikes
inherent in baseband fil-
tering. For effective spec-
trum management, the IF
filter’s bandwidth needs
to be adjusted to each
mission’s maximum telem-
etry data rate.
Baseband filtering is advantageous
because the filters operate at low
power levels, are lightweight, do not
reduce transmitted RF power and are
small and simple (lowpass rather than
a bandpass). Baseband filtering of
phase-modulated signals suffers from
the disadvantage of introducing spikes
into the RF spectrum [2]. Despite this
limitation, baseband filtering is the only
practical method to limit the transmit-
ted RF spectrum for the purpose of
improving bandwidth efficiency.
Pulse shaping
In general, the MPSK (M’ary phase
shift keying) spectrum consists of a
main lobe representing the middle of
the spectrum and various side lobes located
on either side of the main lobe. Shaping the
spectrum should satisfy two criteria: The main
lobe should be as narrow as possible, and the
maximum side lobe level should be as small
as possible relative to the main lobe [3].
In recent years, studies have shown that
PSK modulation is particularly suited
to digital satellite communications. The power
spectra of a PSK signal has a
char-
acteristic that may interfere with adjacent
Figure 1. Various filter location configurations for BPSK
spectrum .
Figure 3. Unfiltered BPSK spectrum.
For effective spectrum management, the
IF filter’s bandwidth needs to be adjusted to
each mission’s maximum telemetry data rate.
Figure 2. Simulated PSD of BPSK spectrum using new
pulse shaping filter.