Advantages and drawbacks of using millimeter waves in the telephone and data subscriber distribution network are listed. Fields in which it seems attractive to use millimeter wave loops are examined. For such applications, cost and reliability constraints led to the design of very simple systems. Two systems will soon be introduced into the French subscriber plant. The first one will be commissioned in 1983 to connect groups of remote subscribers, working at 31 GHz, using a homodyne millimetric front end. The second one, still under experiment, is designed for the connection of subscribers of the integrated service communication network; working at 23 GHz, it uses time-division multiplexing to assume duplex operation. The most drastic constraint when setting up such systems is the line-of-sight requirement. Investigations of that problem, using computer-aided coverage map plotting are discussed.

A computational method allowing the calculation of bit error rate in the presence of filtering and some other impairments is described for 16 QAM modulation; a breadboard working at a bit rate of 140 Mbits/s has been implemented and experimental results are compared with calculated values. The possible use of this modulation type for a high capacity digital radio-relay system is considered. Some parameters are introduced for this purpose, especially the net fade margin parameter. In the case of the 140 Mbit/s system in the 10.7-11.7 GHz frequency band, 4 PSK and 8 PSK modulation types are compared with 16 QAM. System gain, frequency arrangement, nodal capacity and outage performances are evaluated.