Troposcatter

Dear Guest,

In reply to your forum thread and questions about troposcatter. There is only one company, Comtech Systems, that makes a complete troposcatter system. All the items in a tropo system can be seen on the Comtech Systems web site. Regarding a tropo system, the digtal tropo modem is by far the most important part of a tropo system. GD does not make a tropo modem. I am aware of only two companies that make tropo modems, Radyne and Comtech Systems. Other companies have made tropo modems in the past, but it seems only Comtech and Radyne have a current offering.

You asked what makes a complete tropo system? The major items in a complete tropo system are: quad diversity tropo modem; radio consisting of dual frequncy upconveter and quad diversity down converter; high power amplifiers; low noise preamps; specialized antennas; and many specialized filters, duplexers and combiners. Other items are a very stable clock at each end, power supplies, alarm and monitoring, link performance monitoring, and network management. Some important considerations are predicting the link performance, choosing the capacity and error coding, and followup link performance monitoring and analysis.

One could try to assemble a tropo system out of pieces bought from different vendors, but there are many factors conspiring against you to be successful. In general from my many years experience in tropo systems it is better to be aligned with a major tropo systems manufacturer and work closely with them in developing the requirements, specifications, system criteria, test and commissioning, and follow-on operation and maintenance.

I would be pleased to provide more information as you may require. Regards, Time Traveler.

See http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/equip/an-trc-170.htm