Development of an advanced nano-satellite (VELOX-I) - mission control system ground station development

• Main Author: Ye, Chuang.
• Other Authors: Low Kay Soon
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Satellite telecommunication; DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Wireless communication systems
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/49833
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Since April 2010, NTU has started the development of VELOX-I. It is the First nano-satellite mission of the NTU Undergraduate Satellite Program (USP) and also the First nano-satellite mission in South East Asia. In this Final Year Project (FYP), we aim to develop an operational ground station to ensure a reliable communication link for the command and control of VELOX-I. The scope of this project consists of hardware and software development, link budget calculation and link performance analysis.In this project, the hardware and software architectures have been developed after studying other similar satellite ground station projects, such as the Delfi-n3Xt ground station and IRV student ground station. To quantify the expected performance of the developed ground station, the link budget calculation is performed. The results show that in the worst case, the ground station has an uplink margin of 12.41 dB, a downlink margin of 15.49 dB and a G/T ratio of -13.45 dB. To measure the G/T ratio of the receiving system experimentally, the Y-factor method has been used. The results show that the average G/T ratio is -10.66 dB. From these performance metrics, we are confident that the NTU ground station has adequate performance to receive BPSK downlink signal from VELOX-I with a 10-6 bit error rate.