What is the propagation channel emulation?
 

In today’s fast-evolving satellite communications landscape, ensuring reliable, high-performance connectivity is a major challenge.

Every satellite signal must travel through a complex and unpredictable environment — from ground stations, through the atmosphere, to space, and sometimes between satellites themselves. Along the way, signals encounter multiple impairments such as interference, noise, fading, doppler shift, echoes, and distortion.

To design and deploy satellites with confidence, engineers must ensure — well before launch — that the satellite will be able to communicate with the ground, no matter what disturbances it encounters once in orbit. This is precisely where propagation channel emulation becomes essential.

Propagation channel emulation is the process of recreating real-world radio transmission conditions in a controlled laboratory environment. It simulates the behavior of radio signals as they travel between satellites and ground stations — or even between satellites themselves.

• Anticipate real-world impairments that could degrade performance.
• Test end-to-end transmission performance under realistic conditions.
• Optimize communication system designs to withstand real-life challenges such as interference, multipath propagation, and atmospheric effects.

Once a satellite is launched, fixing communication issues becomes extremely costly — if not impossible. Propagation channel emulation allows comprehensive pre-launch testing, ensuring robust link performance from day one.

By recreating real propagation conditions in the lab, engineers gain access to reliable performance data across all the conditions the satellite will experience in orbit. This includes testing:

• Bandwidth
• Throughput
• Latency
• Error rates

This thorough validation reduces risk, accelerates design cycles, and shorten the in-orbit qualification time before entering into operation.