Abstract: A communication system employing site diversity combing to increase link availability includes at least two receivers at receive sites within a single downlink beam separated by enough distance to provide decorrelation of weather phenomena—such as rain fade outages. A signal transmits digital symbols to all the receivers and may use bandwidth efficient modulation with forward error correction coding. Sampled symbol values for each codeword are produced at each receiver, which are connected by one or more ground links so that all data can be collected at one site. At least two different soft-decision computation modules translate the sampled symbol values from the different receivers into different sets of soft-decision values—which may be log-likelihood-ratio (LLR) values reflecting the probability value for each bit of the codeword—that are digitally synchronized and combined for use by a decoder. The technique thus avoids disadvantages of either coherent waveform combining or BER-based digital switching.

Abstract: A communication system includes a transmitter that transmits both wideband data and narrowband data on a link and a receiver that receives the wideband data and the narrowband data on the link. The receiver demultiplexes the wideband data and the narrowband data into separate data streams so that the link effects transmission of a narrowband channel and a wideband channel. The system achieves high link availability on a link using bandwidth efficient modulation by using a more robust modulation format for the narrowband channel to enable higher link availability for the narrowband channel (carrying the narrowband data on the link) than for the wideband channel. The link may employ bandwidth efficient modulation or may be compatible with prior art wideband modulation formats.