Development of ground station communication system for an advanced nano-satellite VELOX II

• Main Author: Wee, Doreen Zhen Hua
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Satellite telecommunication
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/61369
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Following VELOX-I, the first nano-satellite project of NTU Undergraduate Satellite Program, VELOX-II is the next nano-satellite project which is now also in the midst of development and prototyping stage. In this final year project, the main objective is to develop a ground station communication system, mainly the integrated command ranging and telemetry baseband system of the earth ground station which will used for the communication with VELOX-II. The scope of the project involves link budget analysis, hardware analysis and also simulation of the ground station using GNU Radio platform. In this project, link budget analysis is done for the modelling of the expected link performance for both uplink and downlink communication. For the hardware aspect, the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) is chosen after doing hardware comparison over various criteria. The main reason is due to the flexibility of the USRP. The downlink transmission of the ground station was simulated in the GNU Radio platform. Digital and analogue modulation techniques were applied to produce intermediate and analogue frequency respectively. In conclusion, during the link budget analysis, the different parameters for developing of the ground station were verified to be suitable and the GNU Radio platform has simulated the ground station architecture.