An Efficient Analog Predistorter for Satellite Communication in <i>Ku</i>-Band
Ashish Kumar, Meenakshi Rawat
Abstract
The distortions associated with the power amplifier (PA) is a common phenomenon at high input power levels in communication systems. There are predistortion techniques to overcome it, but as the frequency of operation increases, it becomes difficult for conventional predistortion techniques to achieve efficient linearization. This letter proposes an analog predistorter (APD) that works efficiently with the high PAs in the Ku-band. The experimental results show that the PA with the proposed APD achieves an improvement in the carrier-to-third-order-intermodulation ratio (C/I3) of 15.12 dB over PA at 15.5 GHz for a two-tone signal with a tone spacing of 20 MHz. The PA with APD achieves the C/I3 of 30 dBc and above, making it suitable for satellite communication with a small footprint. The technique can be extended to other frequency ranges depending on the applications.