Digital transmission techniques are expected to spread throughout the fixed-satellite service in the near future. The introduction of digital satellite systems will lead to a new requirement regarding how to connect the satellite link with terrestrial digital networks. This paper presents a satellite/terrestrial digital interface that has been developed to interconnect 2.048 Mbit/s PCM terrestrial and INTELSAT TDMA links which are in the plesiochronous relationship. Major functions of the interface include frame slip control, compensation for path length variation, and rate and format conversions. This paper also describes the design and implementation of the developed equipment, and experimental results for signal impairment due to the frame slips and PCM multiplex standard conversion. The experimental results demonstrate that a large humber of bit errors are induced by frame slips for voiceband data transmission above 4800 bits/s.

A TDM/FDM conversion algorithm for realizing transmultiplexers with an FFT processor and a set of digital subfilters is proposed which provides a significant saving in multiplication rate. In the proposed algorithm in which an FDM signal is directly sampled, the dimension of the FFT processor is reduced by provision of pre- and postprocessing and the multiplication rate in radix-3 is reduced by refinement of the processing. In addition, the multiplication rate in the subfilters is reduced by the adoption of symmetrical coefficients. Although the direct sampling of an FDM signal has been considered to increase the multiplication rate compared with the sampling with frequency shift of FDM signal. The authors' estimation shows that the increase of multiplication rate in the proposed algorithm keeps within 20 percent compared with that in a typical algorithm based on sampling with frequency shift of FDM signal. Furthermore, it shows that the proposed algorithm reduces the multiplication rate by 30 percent compared with a previously proposed algorithm based on direct sampling of FDM signal. Based on the proposed algorithm, a digital 60 channel transmultiplexer has been implemented. System configuration of the developed equipment is outlined and its measured performance is described.

Recently, digital systems such as digital telephone switching systems and digital transmission paths are being introduced more and more into communications networks in which signals are handled with Time Division Multiplex (TDM). There still exists, on the other hand, a number of analog transmission paths in which signals are multiplexed with Frequency Division Multiplex (FDM). Therefore, it is important to develop a scheme to interconnect efficiently TDM and FDM systems. Transmultiplexer, which is an equipment directly converting PCM.TDM signals and SSB.FDM signals with each other, is expected to provide an efficient interconneetion between TDM and FDM systems. Authors have developed an experimental transmultiplexer which can provide mutual conversion between a 24-channel PCM primary group (1.544 Mbits/s) and two 12-channel FDM basic groups (60-108 kHz). The developed equipment is designed so as to achieve reduction of the computation rate and simplicity of the hardware by the following techniques: (1) The FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) technique is used to optimize the filtering and multiplexing processes. (2) The spectrum reversion of odd-numbered channel signals is achieved by inverting the sign bits of the PCM signals every other frame. (3) The bandpass sampling technique is applied to obtain SSB.FDM signals directly without frequency shifts at analog FDM stages. In order to evaluate the characteristics of the developed transmultiplexer, experiments have been conducted by connecting it with FDM terminal equipments. The experimental results showed that the transmultiplexer can offer better performance than the tandem connection of standard PCM multiplex equipments and standard FDM terminal equipments with reasonable hardware.