Challenges and Achievements Setting up a Propagation Campaign with MEO Satellites

This paper addresses briefly the challenges and solutions of setting up a receiver for a MEO satellite constellation. The challenge is clearly higher to the same task for a geostationary satellite or a satellite with a small inclination as in the case of Alphasat. The wide variation in satellite coordinates; the satellite handover; having different beacon frequencies; and, the beacon modulation; add complexity to the entire system. The developed low cost two channels beacon receiver is described: the pointing system, the RF hardware, the software detection and the data handling. Some collected time series data are presented and described.