Product Description

Communication Satellite Systems Engineering can be divided into several widely disporate fields - 1) the design of the communications transponder, 2) the space platform around to carry it, 3) a launch system for placing it into orbit, 4) the earth stations for communicating and, 5) the interconnection lines with terrestrial systems. Each of the chapters of this book tries to give the systems engineer a broad understanding of these different elements of the system and their relationship to each other.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1539393 in Books
• Published on: 1993-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Customer Reviews

A fine practicing system engineer's guidebook to satcom.
The authors cover nearly all the practical ground of the title from antennas to orbitology to video. The book mainly targets BS/MSEE engineers and is an excellent match at a general professional level. Highly experienced pros or academics may refer to it for breadth. The chapter problem sets make it a reasonable fourth year textbook. The index and lists of acronyms and symbols are better than average. Typography and graphics are outstanding.

To do this in only 550 pages (12 chapters) the authors perform a delicate trade-off between logging technical issues and delving into them. The reviewer judges it overall a wise set of trades. No real attempt is made to go into many subtopics past a thorough discussion of basic motives, mathematical relationships and key results, limitations and conventional use. "Middle ground" development and derivation may be missing or merely suggested in some cases. There is essentially no discussion of military vice commercial satcom except noting the hard-limiting transponder. Yet the reader gets a solid feel for the "lay of the land" in both theory and practice. In overall content, the book leans toward RF and physics, and away from data transmission and networking. This sets it apart from books on VSAT. Reference lists go back to classics (e.g. Nyquist in 1928) and forward to about 1991. It is an excellent complement to specialized satellite communication texts on the engineer's reference bookshelf.

Some criticisms can be argued. Topic balance is not always satisfying. For one example, two packed chapters (117 pages) present orbits to an admirable "user level" of detail. Yet only one chapter (40 pages) presents the critical topic of multiple access, and there is only one paragraph on DAMA. In another example, the digital modulations PSK, QPSK and 8-PSK are overviewed but not MSK; yet good references made to Lindsey, Proakis, et. al. Their coverage and references on forward error correction (FEC) coding is even thinner relative to other equally important topics, and in the reviewer's opinion this is one of the book's few shortfall areas holding it down to four stars. This second edition is dated 1993, and a third edition correcting some (few) errors, gaps and shortages (e.g. FEC) should be very welcome by the engineering community. It could be a five star text without rewriting most of it.

[Reviewer's Notes: I own and use this book. I am a professional telecommunication system engineer. I have no relation to the editor, author or publisher. Stars are opinionated and awarded parsimoniously. Five stars is top flight quality and relevance; such a book may not always exist in a given subject. Four is a standout among existing works. Three is solid quality and can be very useful. Two disappoint somewhat but there may be reasons to keep it. One star covers everything from finding many significant flaws to a disaster; I'll spend my time with more stars.]