Software Receiver Processing for Deep Space Telemetry Applications

The research described in this publication was carried out by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. © 2010 California Institute of Technology. Government sponsorship acknowledged. Recently, much effort has been placed toward the development of the Reconfigurable Wideband Ground Receiver (RWGR): a variable-data-rate, reprogrammable receiver, whose technologies are intended for infusion into the Deep Space Network. A significant thrust of that effort has been focused on the development of field-programmable gate array (FPGA)–based algorithms for processing high-rate waveforms up to 640 Mbps. In this article, we describe the development of software receiver algorithms used to perform telemetry demodulation of lowto medium-data-rate signals.