Rural communications in multi-path channels: Spread spectrum applications

Abstract

All radio communications occur in channels that have definite multipath characteristics. Two effects that are predominant in such a model, depending on the delay relative to the bit period, are Inter Symbol Interference (ISI) and fading. In this paper ISI is investigated in greater detail and the theoretical error performance for BPSK in a multi-path channel is derived. It is also shown how spread spectrum improves the error performance of BPSK without a "rake" receiver in such an environment and the selection of parameters of spread spectrum to maximize error performance is briefly discussed.<>