Bandwidth- and power-efficient quadrature carrier modulation techniques are identified, evaluated, and compared. The modulation techniques include quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), staggered QPSK (SQPSK), and minimum (frequency) shift keying (MSK). High quality QPSK, SQPSK, and MSK transmitters and receivers were used in the evaluation, along with a computer simulation program which modeled the hardware. Both linear and nonlinear channels were included in the comparative investigation. The agreement between simulated and measured results is shown to be excellent. In the comparison of modulation techniques, the effects of channel filtering (band limiting), nonlinearities, detection techniques, and phase equalization are addressed. The application-oriented results are intended to be an aid in selecting modulation and detection implementations, and in predicting the performance of linear and nonlinear communication systems. For systems with imperfections, data are presented for determination of passive detection filters which can outperform "matched" integrate and dump (I&D) filters.

A variation of an old but neglected pulse shaping technique, raised-cosine, is investigated. By overlapping raised-cosine pulses in each of two data streams and then by quadrature combining them, a simple QPSK/MSK type modulation results. This quadrature overlapped raised-cosine (QORC) modulation exhibits a hybrid structure of QPSK and MSK modulations. The power spectral density of QORC is shown to take on the form of the product of the power spectral densities of MSK and QPSK. The obvious consequences are that the power spectral density main lobe retains the width of the spectral density main lobe of QPSK, but the sidelobes drop off much faster(1/f^{6}). A simple QORC modulator can be implemented similar to an MSK modulator. Several correlation type receivers are investigated and their performances calculated. Computer simulation results are used to compare end-to-end system performance of QORC and staggered QORC (SQORC) with MSK, QPSK, and staggered QPSK (SQPSK) for both linear and nonlinear satellite channels. The performance of QORC and SQORC compares very favorably with QPSK, SQPSK, and MSK. QORC performs particularly well in the presence of a nonlinear channel. The effect of phase equalization of the channel filter was investigated with outstanding performance improvement. The simulation results show that sidelobe regeneration caused by the channel nonlinearity is much less for SQORC than it is for the other modulation formats considered.

The noncoherent binary frequency-shift keyed (FSK) receiver analyzed in this concise paper employs predetection filters with bandwidths much larger than the symbol rate. Wide-band predetection filtering is used in order to trade performance for simplicity and reduced costs. In this analysis bit-error rate (BER) degradation due to wide predetection filter bandwidths and intersymbol interference caused by postdetection filtering is determined. The postdetection filters considered are single-pole RC and two-pole Butterworth filters. The receiver performance using these filters is compared with the performance achieved when using integrate-and-dump postdetection filtering. Experimental and simulation results are presented which agree well with the analysis.

The performance of a noncoherent frequency-shift keying (FSK) system employing postdetection filtering is determined. The FSK pulses are allowed to be amplitude modulated (AM-FSK) and the postdetection filter is allowed to be arbitrary. The analysis for the general case will be shown to simplify the previously known results when the AM is removed and the postdetection filter is an integrate-and-dump. The numerical results will take into account the effects of intersymbol interference. Both computer simulation results and experimental results will be presented and will be shown to agree quite closely with the analysis.