LOOP- SIMULATION OF THE AUTOMATIC FREQUENCY CONTROL SUBSYSTEM OF A DIFFERENTIAL MINIMUM SHIFT KEYING RECEIVER

The LOOP computer program was written to simulate the Automatic Frequency Control (AFC) subsystem of a Differential Minimum Shift Keying (DMSK) receiver with a bit rate of 2400 baud. The AFC simulated by LOOP is a first order loop configuration with a first order R-C filter. NASA has been investigating the concept of mobile communications based on low-cost, low-power terminals linked via geostationary satellites. Studies have indicated that low bit rate transmission is suitable for this application, particularly from the frequency and power conservation point of view. A bit rate of 2400 BPS is attractive due to its applicability to the linear predictive coding of speech. Input to LOOP includes the following: 1) the initial frequency error; 2) the double-sided loop noise bandwidth; 3) the filter time constants; 4) the amount of intersymbol interference; and 5) the bit energy to noise spectral density. LOOP output includes: 1) the bit number and the frequency error of that bit; 2) the computed mean of the frequency error; and 3) the standard deviation of the frequency error. LOOP is written in MS SuperSoft FORTRAN 77 for interactive execution and has been implemented on an IBM PC operating under PC DOS with a memory requirement of approximately 40K of 8 bit bytes. This program was developed in 1986.