Experimental study on the impact of HF channel characteristic parameters on communication error rate

A test platform combined HF communication with ionospheric oblique sounding is introduced, with which the ionosphere channel sounding and communication is carried out synchronously using the same hardware equipment. By this way, the problem of equipment mismatch and no real-time channel parameters could be solved. Based on the experimental data measured by this platform the communication bit error ratio(BER) and the channel characteristic parameters, including signal to noise ratio (SNR), fading depth, fading rate, mulitipath spread, signal strength, group distance, the phase of major-mode, Doppler shift and Doppler spread, are extracted. The impact of the channel characteristic parameters on the communication BER is statistically analyzed. Significant conclusions are proposed in the end of this paper.