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An optical preamplifier is utilized to improve the signal-to-noise and distortion ratio (SNDR) of intersatellite microwave photonic links employing a Mach-Zehnder modulator under dual-tone modulation. The resulting SNDR at an appropriate direct current (DC) bias phase shift is additionally investigated without small-signal approximation in order to optimize the performance of all the links. It is observed that the most limiting factor degrading the SNDR performance is changed, and the fundamental power is seen to increase more compared with the power of third-order intermodulation (IM3) plus noise due to the optical preamplifier. Thus, SNDR can be improved with respect to the case of a nonoptical preamplifier. For the preamplifier gain of 20 dB and noise figure of 3 dB, an increase of about 24 dB in optimum SNDR is accessible. In addition, the optimum DC bias phase shift is found to be insensitive to the preamplifier gain and noise figure, while the optimum SNDR is sensitive to the preamplifier gain and noise figure.

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Grating interferometry that features long range and nanometer resolution is presented. The optical system was established based on a single long metrology grating. The large fringe multiplication was achieved by properly selecting two high-order diffraction beams to form a fringe pattern. The fringe pattern collected by a linear array was first tailored to a few multiples of fringes in order to suppress the effect of the energy leakage on phase-extracting precision when the fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm was used to calculate its phase. Thus, the phase-extracting precision of a tailored fringe pattern by FFT was greatly improved. Based on this, a novel subdividing method, which exploited the time-shift property of FFT, was developed to subdivide the fringe with large multiple and high accuracy. Numerical results show that the system resolution reaches 1 nm. The experimental results obtained against a capacitive sensor in the sub-mm range show that the measurement precision of the system is less than 10 nm.