Wideband Channel Combiner
The Wideband Channel Combiner, designed and implemented by Fourier Space for Quasar Satellite Technologies, performs spectral synthesis for the multi-beam phased-array receiver.
The Wideband Channel Combiner receives up to 80 MHz of bandwidth divided into 10 dual-polarization beams, each with a bandwidth of 8 MHz, channelized and oversampled at ~17.6 kHz, and quantized with 16 bits per sample. The Wideband Channel Combiner acts as a synthesis filter bank, combining fine channels into wider bands of tunable width and center frequency, while applying windows in both the time and frequency domains to improve signal quality.
The Wideband Channel Combiner executes on a single server equipped with an NVIDIA Connect-X 5 dual-port Network Interface Card (NIC). A 100GbE port receives a stream of CODIF (CSIRO Oversampled Data Interchange Format) UDP packets from the phased-array beam-former, and a 10GbE port sends a stream of VITA-49 UDP packets for downstream signal processing.