Blind Estimation of the HPA Operating Point in Multicarrier Satellite Transponders.

Satellite operators need to know the operating point of a transponder to provide a good transmission quality. Especially in satellite networks with many small carriers in one transponder, the estimation is challenging because of gain compression, capture effects or unknown attenuation in the transmission channel. We propose a blind estimator based on signal statistics to overcome these problems. The new estimator is independent of a-priori information about the carrier modulation and the absolute power of the received signal. The method is applicable to existing satellites because we only use a simulation model of the transponder together with the sampled receive signal for the estimation process.