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Auspace opens
Adelaide office
Variable orbits . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Come-in FedSat
Acquisition
Tracking
Once youve found the satellite, the next step is to keep the
antenna pointing right at it as it zooms across the sky.
With FedSat, the narrow Ka-band beam-width means
theres very small margin for error in tracking. Even slight
deviations from dead-on will limit communications ability.
Its even more complicated because normal tracking
involves moving slightly off then back on the beam, to
gauge where the signal is strongest. We can only move
such a small amount before we lose communications that
theres really insufficient movement to get a good difference between the amplitudes, to determine the exact
position of the satellite. The problem wouldnt occur so
much at lower frequency bands. If you were using say
UHF frequencies to track FedSat, you would not suffer the
same attenuation or narrow beamwidth problems. The
pointing requirements for communications would not be
as critical. The wider beam widths mean that you can
tolerate a larger antenna pointing error, before effective
communications are lost, said Keith.
Commercial systems deal with this problem by giving
the satellite enough power and sufficient beam width. This
enables quality reception to be maintained by moving
slightly ahead of and behind the satellite. But these
options arent available for Ka band communications with
FedSat, needing a whole new Earth station concept.
I see this as a really useful part, probably an unexpected part of the project, says Keith. We didnt
envisage that wed have to design a pedestal system. But I
see it as a very interesting and useful part of our research
and development. It may also have commercial applications for the CRC.
zenith passes on the way down. Thats okay for widebeam satellites, but for FedSat would cause critical delays.
The UTS ground station employs a newer and more agile
design. It has an X-Y axis forming a cross, says Keith.
This can accurately and quickly move the dish in all
directions.
And since the use of the Ka-band is relatively new,
suitable components are not yet widely available. So the
UTS team have to build much of the equipment themselves. The biggest thing were manufacturing is the
pedestal itself to move the antenna; this includes the
algorithms to control its movement and the required signal
processing, says Keith.
To get a pedestal capable of overhead passes and which
could keep up with FedSat is quite expensive, says Keith.
Suitable commercially available pedestals alone begin at
$100,000. Our whole Earth station is going to cost about
that, including all the electronics, the antenna, the signal
processing, everything. So all up, to commercially buy
what were building here, I think you wouldnt get much
change out of half a million dollars, maybe more.
One of the main goals of the UTS project is a transportable Ka-band Earth station capable of being set up
anywhere. Ka-band components are small because of the
high frequency, so the prototype Earth station, including
the Ka-band antenna, would easily fit inside a utility
vehicle tray. As more Ka-band manufacturers come online, subsequent units will be even smaller. Certain offthe-shelf components can be eliminated, in favour of
smaller, better integrated products which include several
components in the one box.
Applications
But what can all this bandwidth actually do? Wed really
like to communicate at a minimum of a 128 kilobits per
Name:
Keith Willey
Position:
Background:
My background for about 20 years prior to joining the CRC had been in broadcasting. I
started off as a technician working with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. After some
experience with commercial stations in northern NSW, he became a specialist broadcast
engineering officer and technical manager. His interest in satellite communications came from
its use in broadcasting. He completed his undergraduate engineering degree at UTS while
working in the ABC engineering department.
I saw the CRCSS as an opportunity to get into working with satellites, especially in Ka-band,
which I believe will play a big part in future communications systems. Keith believes Australia
can make a strong contribution to this field. If it werent for the CRCSS I wouldnt be doing a
PhD, Id be off working somewhere, but I saw it as an opportunity ... to work on something that
was actually going into orbit, and have some application. I found that particularly appealing;
its a way of doing research and attacking a project at the same time.
What next?:
Id like to think this project is viable, and will attract some sort of funding, whether from
private industry or government, to keep the research side of this going. ... If that was the case,
there could be quite a good industry or business surrounding that, so Id be interested to keep
working in that area.
UTS in context
Auspace has no
capability to test the
antenna pointing and so
forth, so the radio
frequency signal will be
fed by wire into the test
points in the communications payload. On the
receive side, the signals
will be extracted from the
communications payload
and go back into our
Earth station.
Timescales
Computing on
the fly
High performance
spend as much time moving data around as actual calculations, so up to 99% of the logic gates are idle most of the
time. With an FPGA, you can design the circuit exactly
for the algorithm you want, and get much higher numbers
of transistors doing useful things at the same time, said
Dr Bergmann. If you want to do ten operations, rather
than taking 1 piece of data and doing the 10 operations for
that, and taking the next one and doing ten operations for
that, an FPGA can have 10 separate operators. The first
piece of data comes into operator number 1, the when it
moves to operator 2 you can bring another piece in, and
operator 1 can start moving on that. These custom
circuits can be repeated almost infinitely, so although
they may only be doing clock cycles 1/10th as fast, if you
can fit 100 of those operations on your FPGA youve got a
performance factor of ten, and if youve got 100 FPGAs,
well youre up to a performance factor of 1000. FPGAs
offer much higher performance if the calculation is simple
and repetitive.
Big applications that show promise are things like
image and video processing, where you have very regular
algorithms repeated over perhaps some million pixels,
said Dr Bergmann. These calculations can be done in
parallel. For example, the standards for studio-quality
digital video are 27 million cycles per second. Theres no
way microprocessors can handle that sort of rate, whereas
thats just about the limit of FGPAs comfortable clock
speed. Similarly, data encryption and text-searching use
simple, repetitive algorithms, which benefit from the
stackable FPGAs. But so far few products use FPGAs,
partly because theyre so hard to program.
Reconfigurable computers
on the ground
Pioneer research
logic over the last 10 years, but without much systematic examination of the best approaches for designing
these circuits. Her two main research questions were
when is it useful to to use reconfigurable logic, so we
tried to establish video computing parameters about
when it would be useful; and secondly, if its useful to
use it for a particular application, whats the best way
to design those circuits for that application.
Dr Chung compared standard video compression
algorithms and some of her own new methods, and
examined which were the most important components
of video compression algorithms. She was able to
measure the huge performance increase FPGA
computers give over conventional chips in video
compression.
Above: GPS
multipathing.
Reflected GPS
signals cause
inaccuracies in GPS
position calculations.
Centre: GPS
multipath signals
give an intial peak,
since the nonreflected signal takes
the shortest time to
arrive, followed by
subsequent reflected
signals. Ignoring the
subsequent signals
can help mitigate the
affects of GPS
multipathing.
10
Bottom: modelling
GPS multipath from
known surfaces.
Images courtesy Dr
Rod Walker.
Novel research
But even so, FedSats not the perfect setup. The power
constraint provides a challenge. We aim to achieve the
same level of performance as a continously operating
receiver, but by using the spacecraft for short periods
only, he said.
CRC
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