Design of a small satellite for performing measurements in a ground station network

Abstract

Small satellites gain more and more interests from both educational and academic institutions, but also from the industry. They constitute a cheap alternative to large, more expensive and more complex satellites. A consequence of their small form factor is the lack of space for secondary payload, like advanced communication facilities. These deficiencies make it difficult to apply quality assurances concerning satellite communication links on the ground segment. Previous approaches have been primarily passive and focused only on the bit error rate of receiving links at ground stations. The results therefor covered only one direction of a bidirectional link and even if they were quite accurate in common, they were nevertheless only approximations. In this paper a novel design solution based on a small satellite cluster is going to be proposed to offer quality assurance for the ground segment in both sending and receiving directions in multiple amateur frequency bands based on highaccurate error rate information.