Performance Envelope of Broadband HF Data Waveforms

Parallel efforts are underway in the frequency management and the radio and waveform design communities to support data communications over HF radio channels wider than conventional 3 kHz allocations. In this paper, the authors analyze the potential performance of such "Wideband" HF data channels as a function of spectrum allocation, coding, channel characteristics, and waveform overhead. For many years, both voice and data communications in the High-Frequency (HF) radio bands have been restricted to channel bandwidths no wider than 3 kHz (although occasionally a single transmitter was allowed to occupy up to four adjacent 3 kHz channels with independent transmissions on each channel).