Slope Equalisation / Slope Compensation

Increasingly, customers are using a wider bandwidth, particularly at L-band, and teleports and satellite ground stations are expanding meaning longer cable runs. The negative slope (or attenuation of higher frequencies more than lower frequencies in a given piece of equipment) inherent in much equipment and particularly coaxial cables is becoming more of an issue.

At ETL we have worked with full L-band (850-2150 MHz) for a long time and our frequency response or flatness in general is excellent.

Many customers however are finding that across their entire RF chain the negative slope is too much and this causes problems with signal quality / lock / C/N, BER etc.

As well as variable gain, several of ETL's L-band Amplifiers also feature variable L-band Slope Compensation or L-band Equalisation (typically 0,3,6 or 9 dB of positive slope over 850-2150 MHz). The combination of these two features has been used by many large satcoms users to balances the losses and negative slope of extended cable runs, ensuring that all signals are coming into the RF processing chain at similar levels across all frequencies.