FACSAT-1 Ground Station performance

摘要

In this paper are found the architecture and performance analysis of a small, ground station to track and receive signals from FACSAT-1, which operates on the UHF-band (430 MHz to 440 MHz). The proposed ground station uses a 20-dB gain Yagi-Uda antenna and a small LNA filter with 30 dB gain. The rest of the analogy front-end is a software-defined radio dongle with a USB interface to a desktop computer and a radio transceiver provided by GomSpace Inc. The software-defined nature of the front-end gives the station the flexibility to target satellites in this band with diverse power, modulation and error-correcting schemes, and the proprietary system guarantees accurate operation from all the ground station. We report performance evaluation results for outdoor operation. The proposed ground station can be adapted in any locations with fixed outdoor antennas. Given its low cost, it can be easily adopted for classroom and laboratory activities related to satellite signal processing.