Design and tests of 21 km, 5 Gbps, 0.14 THz wireless communication system

A terahertz wireless communication system is designed. The 16QAM modulation scheme is used in baseband processing, and mixers are used for cascading frequency up and down-converting. Cascading power amplification technique is adopted with a solid-state power amplifier and a vacuum electronic device. Several watts power is emitted at 0.14 THz. An all solid-state receiver running in room temperature is used, whose equivalent noise temperature is 1100 K and receiving sensitivity is -57 dBm. A 21 km wireless communication testing is carried out between the Shuangliu district and the Xinjin county of Chengdu, by means of two Cassegrain antennas with 50 dBi gain each. A 5 Gbps single-channel transmission speed is measured with bit error rate below 10-6. For testing, two standard HD-SDI uncompressed video streams are successfully transmitted in real time simultaneously, with an effective speed of 1.485 Gbps for each one.