Design of a software radio hardware platform for a picosatellite

Abstract

In the recent years, space has continued to gain interest from many individuals and institutions, giving them the opportunity to apply their field of expertise in new challenging applications. The development of the CubeSats Standard has allowed universities and other institutions to make satellite design and experimentation a feasible project in terms of costs and development time. The most recent boom in CubeSats technology is the pico-satellite standard, which has a form factor one-eight the size of a typical CubeSats. This comes at a cost of reduced power generation, volume and surface area when it comes to the implementation of the various systems within the satellite. Nevertheless, in any satellite system, no matter the size, a communication platform is required in order for any data to be exchanged. This dissertation presents a preliminary design for the hardware necessary to sustain a software defined radio based communication system which will be used for University of Malta’s (UM) first satellite, UoMBSat-1. The communication system’s minimum requirements were first obtained, keeping in mind the stringent constraints imposed by the PicoSatellite standards as well those imposed by previous sub-system designs. These requirements as well as the constraints were later used to determine the architecture basis for the communication system which will be implemented using off the shelf components. A testing procedure was designed, which ensures that each block could then be sufficiently tested to meet the necessary requirements.