An air-to-ground free-space optical communication system has been designedand partially developed. The design covers both the communications between theairborne and the ground station, and the acquisition, tracking and pointing. Astrong effort has been made in order to achieve the minimum payload power, sizeand weight, for which a MEMS modulating retroreflector has been chosen. In theground station, a new technique for fine pointing, based on a liquid crystaldevice, is proposed and will be demonstrated, as well as other improvementswith the aim of optimizing the ground station performance.
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