Transforming Satellite Ground Station Architecture Using Software-Defined-Radio

This paper focuses on the Software-Defined-Radio-based miniaturized version of satellite ground station architecture called SDR-Micro-Earth-Station (SDR-MES) to support TTC operations for Geostationary and Geosynchronous spacecraft. For space missions, the ground station plays a critical role in supporting various phases of missions like the Launch and Early Orbit (LEOP) and On-orbit operations. SDR revolutionized the design and operation of satellite ground stations, combining the high performance of wide-band radio front-end with flexible FPGA-based digital backends, which can be reprogrammed using software without any hardware modifications. This paper highlights the pragmatic approach for realizing the miniaturized version of the satellite ground station.