Building distributed ground station system with radio amateurs

Abstract

The paper concerns radio amateur satellites that are built by international student teams. For contacting a satellite, a single ground station is usually used. In this configuration and with the satellite on the low Earth orbit (LEO), teams have contact only for about 40 minutes per day. If the satellite has service for radio amateurs, they use it for 20 hours per day. A lot of them have connection to Internet. This is a big difference. In this paper, is shown how they can use the radio amateur transceivers and antenna systems in order to build ground stations network named distributed ground station system (DGSS). Frequencies, types of modulations, calculation of power budge, and the ways to control amateur stations by the Internet are also shown. These are essential procedures, because radio amateurs have their standards and habits. Finally a proposal of implementation dedicated DGSS system for radio amateurs with and without use of APRS network is put forward. Distributed ground station is one of the experiments on PW-Sat satellite, which is being build on the Warsaw University of Technology.