A Spectral Analysis Based Channel Estimation Method for Time Diversity Combining in Helicopter Satellite Communications

Helicopter satellite communications have to overcome the periodic blockage of the signal caused by rotor blades. To solve this problem, time diversity with maximal ratio combining (MRC) is promising. Although the conventional channel estimation method to perform MRC is accurate, its computational complexity is relatively high because of fast Fourier transform (FFT) and inverse FFT (IFFT). This paper proposes a novel spectral analysis based channel estimation method. The proposed method estimates the channel gain without IFFT. The computer simulation results confirmed that the proposed method reduces the FFT size by 75% without degrading the BER performance compared with the conventional method using IFFT.