Patent ID: 7778335

Claim:
A communication system using hierarchical modulation, comprising: at least one satellite transmitting a data stream and a hierarchically modulated data stream; at least one terrestrial repeater station transmitting the data stream and the hierarchically modulated data stream, wherein the terrestrial repeater station comprises a down converter coupled to a satellite demodulator coupled to hierarchical demodulator, a hierarchical transcoder, a terrestrial hierarchical modulator, and an up converter; at least one receiver for demodulating and combining the data stream from the at least one satellite and from the at least one terrestrial station and for hierarchically demodulating and combining the hierarchically modulated data stream from the at least one satellite and the hierarchically modulated data stream from the at least one terrestrial station; and an uplink having a forward error correction encoder for the data stream and a forward error correction encoder for the hierarchical data stream, a hierarchical modulator for modulating both the data stream and the hierarchical data stream, and an up-converter coupled to the hierarchical modulator, wherein the demodulated combined data stream output from the receiver comprises audio data, and the hierarchically demodulated combined data stream output from the receiver comprises text or image data.