CUBESAT ON-BOARD COMMUNICATION SYSTEM

BASED ON SOFTWARE DEFINED RADIO

Done By: Danilo Cristos, Mohamed Hamid and Abdel-Rahman Mahmoud Supervised By: Dr. Tamer Khattab
Department of Electrical Engineering, Spring 2016

Acknowledgment

Introduction

We would like to thank the college of Engineering at Qatar

University and especially the Department of Electrical
Engineering for giving us a golden chance to work in such a
project. Also, special thanks of gratitude to Dr. Tamer Khattab
for his supervision and guidance throughout the project, as well
as Eng. Mohamed El-Sayed and Eng. Amith Khandakar for
the technical support and motivation.

The CubeSat program was started in 1999, through cooperation

between two Universities: Stanford University and California
Polytechnic State University. The objective was to standardize the
design of small satellites, reduce the cost and the time for
development of small satellites. The CubeSat that is to be
developed by Qatar University, has as a mission, earth imaging for
environmental purposes.

Size and Weight:

Dimensions are1010 cm2 and maximum weight is 1.33 Kg mass. The
internal components must be scaled to fit within these standards.

Cost:
The budget assigned to this project is (10,000 QR). So, this limited
budget has to be considered during the stage of components selection.

Power:
Power consumption of communication system has to be minimized.
Since, CubeSats power is being supplied from solar panels. According to
power system design of CubeSat, the maximum power that can be
supplied to communication system is 4W.

Time:
The design and implementation of the communication system are
supposed to be done in two semesters (fall 2015 and spring 2016).

CubeSat is a picosatellite that has specific

standards (10x10x10 cm and weighting up to
1.33 kg). The main purpose of CubeSat is to
get university students involved in space
projects. The most standard CubeSat is 1U
(functional unit) as shown in figure [1].
Figure [1]: 1U CubeSat

What is SDR?
Software Defined Radio is a
modern technology allows users
to try any possible alternatives
during the stage of designing a
communication system. So SDR
adds the flexibility element to the
system where most of signal
processing part is done at the
baseband level on software
rather than hardware.

USRP B200mini

Figure [2]: USRP B200mini

System Main Blocks

Figure 2. Simulink model of the power supply

Figure [3]: SDR main blocks

Simulation
System simulation without channel:

Figure [4]: System major blocks

Components Availability:
All components in CubeSat have to Commercial off-the Shelf (COTS)
and available in markets.

Legality:

Universal Software Radio Peripheral

(USRP) is developed by Ettus Research
LLC. It is a transceiver that works with
SDR which adds more flexibility to the
designed communication system. Also,
it has a continuous frequency band
starts from (70MHz) up to (6GHz).

Design Constrains

About CubeSat

Practical Implementation
Figure [5]: System blocks without channel

The system must operate within a certain frequency band allowed in

Qatar National Frequency Allocation Table (QNFAT) for amateur
applications. Therefore, carrier frequency was chosen as 437MHz, which
is allowed in Qatar for amateur uses.

Safety:
Safety factor has to be always taken into consideration. All components
and connections should not be harmful and unsafe. Details about power,
temperature and etc. should be reviewed from data sheets for every
single components before usage.

System simulation with channel:

Transmitter:

Figure [6]: System blocks with channel

Figure [9]: Transmitter blocks

Receiver:

Figure [10]: software interference with

hardware (Transmitter)

Future Work
After implementing the project as a regular system on PCs, there is one
option to make it more realistic. Since this communication system is
designed form CubeSat, it has to be movable and small. The payload
contains a transmitter (which is USRP B200mini) and a camera connected
with PC. But, PC is not something realistic to be included in CubeSat
payload. Therefore, it will be replaced by a microcontroller. Moreover,
since the transmitted power is very low a power amplifier at the output of
the device should be used to achieve the required transmitted power.

Figure [15]: Portable communication

system components
Figure [16]: USRP B200mini
connected with Raspberry Pi 3

Figure [7]: Simulation results

without channel

Figure [8]: Simulation results

with channel

Conclusion
To conclude this, the overall objective of the senior design project was to
design and implement a CubeSat on-board communication system based
on SDR. The goals of this project were achieved through many stages
starting from performing a literature survey to be familiar with existing
design of CubeSat transceivers up to implementing the system practically.
USRP B200mini was chosen as a hardware part and MATLAB/Simulink is
the software part. The practical part of the project starts with a simulation
of the system under a dispersive channel, such as Rician fading channel
and the AWGN channel. Then a real ASCII message was transmitted and
received and it was working as expected. After that, the message source
was replaced by an image generator block and the system was modified in
order to meet the project objectives.

Figure [11]: Receiver blocks

Figure [12]: software interference with

hardware (Receiver)

Implementation Results:

Figure [13]: Test-bed

Figure [14]: Implementation results, the

received image with constellation diagram