Patent ID: 8817694

Claim:
A satellite broadcasting system comprising a satellite segment, a ground segment, and a user segment: wherein the satellite segment comprising at least a first satellite, wherein the first satellite further comprising: a M-to-M wavefront (WF) de-multiplexer (demuxer) further comprising N outputs configured to drive N array elements of a downlink broadcast antenna array, M−N diagnostic outputs, where M is greater than N and N is greater than 1; wherein the ground segment comprising: at least one digital beam forming (DBF) processor configured to multiply a content data stream with an N-component beam weight vector (BWV) to create an N-component product vector; a M-to-M WF multiplexer (muxer), further comprising: at least N inputs driven by corresponding ones of the N-component product vector, and M−N diagnostic signal inputs, and M outputs, wherein each of the M outputs further comprising a linear combination of the components of the N-component product vector and the M−N diagnostic signals; a M-channel equalizer adapted to pre-distort the M outputs of the M-to-M WF muxer, further adapted to dynamically compensate for phase and amplitude differentials among M propagation channels between the ground segment and the first satellite.