The Earth's ionosphere can hinder radio propagation with two serious problems: group delay and phase advance. Ionospheric irregularities are significantly troublesome since they make the amplitude and phase of the radio signals fluctuate rapidly, which is known as ionospheric scintillation. Severe ionospheric scintillation could cause loss of phase lock, which would degrade the positioning accuracy and affect the performance of navigation systems. Based on the phase screen model, this paper presents a novel power spectrum model of phase scintillation and a model of amplitude scintillation. Preliminary results show that, when scintillation intensity increases, the random phase and amplitude fluctuations become stronger, coinciding with the observations. Simulations of the scintillation effects on the acquisition of Beidou signals predict acquisition probability. In addition, acquisition probabilities of GPS and Beidou signals under different scintillation intensities are presented. And by the same SNR the acquisition probability decreases when the scintillation intensity increases. The simulation result shows that scintillation could cause the loss of the acquisition performance of Beidou navigation system. According to the comparison of Beidou and GPS simulations, the code length and code rate of satellite signals have an effect on the acquisition performance of navigation system.

Free-space optical communication systems can provide high-speed, improved capacity, cost effective and easy to deploy wireless networks. Experimental investigation on the next generation free-space optical (FSO) communication system utilizing seamless connection of free-space and optical fiber links is presented. A compact antenna which utilizes a miniature fine positioning mirror (FPM) for high-speed beam control and steering is described. The effect of atmospheric turbulence on the beam angle-of-arrival (AOA) fluctuations is shown. The FPM is able to mitigate the power fluctuations at the fiber coupling port caused by this beam angle-of-arrival fluctuations. Experimental results of the FSO system capable of offering stable performance in terms of measured bit-error-rate (BER) showing error free transmission at 2.5 Gbps over extended period of time and improved fiber received power are presented. Also presented are performance results showing stable operation when increasing the FSO communication system data rate from 2.5 Gbps to 10 Gbps as well as WDM experiments.

The characteristics of 155 Mbps optical propagation through atmosphere at the wavelengths of 0.78 and 1.55 m over a 72 m range were measured. Two propagation characteristics were compared to examine the wavelength dependence on the rain rate and the aperture size of a receiver. An enhanced intensity exceeding the signal level measured in the absence of rain was observed at both wavelengths during 7.2 mm/h rain. The resultant bit error rate is shown to be dominated mainly by the rain-induced scintillation rather than the attenuation.

Atmospheric optical communication (AOC) system using subcarrier PSK modulation is proposed and its superiority to OOK modulation in the presence of scintillation is discussed theoretically. An experimental AOC setup with a subcarrier modulated by 155.52(Mb/s) DPSK at light wave-length λ=0.83(µm) over an 1.8(km) outdoor path is employed to show the performance. Theoretical and experimental results are compared under scintillation in clear weather and a good agreement is observed. Finally, AOC systems using subcarrier M-ary PSK and multiple subcarriers are proposed and discussed.