Amity School of Engg &

Technology
M.Tech ECE, Semester II
Satellite Communication
Module 4 Lecture 1

Dr Sanmukh Kaur

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 Learning Objectives & Outcomes

 To understand the frequency and coverage considerations of satellite communication

 Ability to identify the frequency ranges suitable for mobile satellite service

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 Module IV: Some specific geostationary satellites and
low earth orbit satellites
Coverage and frequency consideration

 The mission goals will directly determine the coverage that has to be achieved by a
given satellite system.

 This in turn leads to the selection of orbit, payload technologies, and so on.

 For example, if a communications satellite system has to provide coverage of the

European Union (EU), there is a minimum altitude at which a single satellite can
operate and still cover all of the EU at once.

 If the coverage of the EU must be continuous, a GEO orbit can be selected or a

constellation of NGSO satellites can be designed to provide the necessary coverage
overlap between successive satellites.
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 Coverage and frequency consideration

 The determination of coverage area, while initially an exercise in simple geometry,

is eventually heavily influenced by the available technology both on the ground and
in space, and other aspects such as the radiation environment.

 First we consider the geometrical aspects of determining an optimum coverage.

Elevation angle consideration

 In Fig.1, a spacecraft orbits at distance rs from the center of the earth, C.

 The elevation angle to the satellite is θ. Using the sine rule:

(1)

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 Coverage and frequency consideration

Fig.1 Geometry for calculating coverage area.

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 Coverage and frequency consideration

 Which yields
(2)

 All three parameters in Eq. (2) have key inputs to the architecture of the satellite
system.

 The angle γ will yield the coverage area on the surface of the earth.

 The distance d will determine the free space path loss along the propagation path, and
will be a factor in the link budget design.

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 Coverage and frequency consideration

 The elevation angle θ will influence:

- the G/T ratio of the antenna
- the blockage probability from terrain and buildings near the antenna, and
- the likely propagation impairments that will be encountered along the path to the
satellite.

 For systems that operate in frequency bands that suffer significant degradations in
rain, the elevation angle can be the critical design element

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 Coverage and frequency consideration
Frequency Band

 LEO satellite systems providing data and voice service to mobile users tend to use
the lowest available RF frequency.

 The effective isotropically radiated power (EIRP) required by the satellite

transponder to establish a given C/N ratio in the mobile receiver is proportional to
the square of the RF frequency of the downlink.

 The power that must be transmitted by a mobile transmitter is also proportional to

RF frequency squared when the mobile uses an omnidirectional antenna.

 Since the cost of satellites increases as the EIRP of the transponders increases, a
lower RF frequency yields a lower cost system.

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 Coverage and frequency considerations
 This is one reason why L-band is allocated for MSSs.

 Consider a LEO satellite with a coverage zone on the earth’s surface that has an area
A m2.

 A transponder on the satellite with output power Pt watts drives an antenna with a
gain Gt to produce an EIRP from the satellite of Pt Gt watts.

 The average flux density, F across the coverage zone is therefore

(3)

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 Coverage and frequency considerations
 The value of the flux density is independent of frequency.

 The mobile receiver has an antenna that is omnidirectional, with a gain Gr = 1.

 The effective receiving area of this antenna is given by [ ]:

(4)

 The received power at the mobile earth station is given by Pr = F × A, hence

(5)

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 Coverage and frequency considerations
 The received power at the mobile with an omnidirectional antenna increases as
the square of the wavelength, or decreases as the square of the frequency.

 The lower the RF frequency, the greater the received power for any given coverage
zone.

 By reciprocity, the same result will apply when the mobile terminal transmits with
an omnidirectional antenna.

 That is why Orbcomm’s data relay LEO satellite system uses very high frequency
(VHF) (30–300 MHz) and ultra high frequency (UHF) (300–3000 MHz)
frequencies.

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 Coverage and frequency considerations
 For the same reasons, L-band (1–2 GHz) is allocated for MSS, but to achieve similar
C/N ratios with L-band links as Orbcomm satellites achieve with VHF links, the L-
band satellite must provide multiple beams from a high gain antenna.

 One disadvantage of VHF and UHF frequency bands is a high noise power due to
the natural environment.

 For this reason, the antenna noise temperature for a system operating at VHF or
UHF will be much higher than the receiver noise temperature.

 Environmental noise temperature falls with increasing frequency; by L-band it is not

a significant factor.

 By reciprocity, the same result will apply when the mobile terminal transmits with
an omnidirectional antenna.
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 Coverage and frequency considerations
 The worst possible choice of frequency for a mobile system is Ka-band (about 20–
30 GHz), or above.

 A Ka-band mobile downlink operating at 20 GHz requires 22.5 dB more transmitted

EIRP, or receiving antenna gain, than the same system operating at 1.5 GHz.

 Occasionally proposals are aired for Ka bandmobile systems, but such a system can
only succeed with a steered directional antenna on the mobile terminal.

 It is worth noting in passing that it is the omnidirectional antenna of a mobile

terminal that drives up the cost of every transmitted bit in a mobile system.

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 Coverage and frequency considerations
 Antenna gain is the system designer’s friend.

 Mobile systems will become much more attractive economically when a self
steering, self phasing, phased array is available for mobile terminals with even a
moderate gain.

 A 10 dB increase in antenna gain translates directly to a 10-fold increase in bit rates.

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 Amity School of Engg &
Technology
M.Tech ECE, Semester II
Satellite Communication
Module 4 Lecture 2

Dr Sanmukh Kaur

15
 Learning Objectives & Outcomes

 To understand the Elevation angle considerations and requirement of minimum

elevation angle

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 Elevation angle considerations
Elevation Angle Considerations

 Lecture 1 covers in brief definition and elevation angle considerations including

influence of elevation angle.

 As rain attenuation can cause significant attenuation on a slant path. At Ka-band

(30/20 GHz), even light rain can cause appreciable signal loss.

 Light rain is usually stratified and so, the higher the elevation angle the lower the
rain attenuation for a given rainfall rate. Fig1 illustrates the geometry.

 Most commercial satellite systems require that earth stations operate above certain
minimum elevation angles.

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 Elevation angle considerations

Fig.1Illustration of the decrease in the path through rain as the elevation angle to the
18 satellite increases.
 Elevation angle considerations
 The worst possible choice of frequency for a mobile system is Ka-band (about 20–
30 GHz), or above.

 For example, INTELSAT requires that all earth stations using INTELSAT C-Band
(6/4 GHz) satellites operate above 5°, otherwise the earth station does not meet
INTELSAT’s standard specification and must be qualified for operation on an
individual basis.

 To qualify an earth station on an individual basis is an expensive undertaking.

 At Ku-band (14/11, 14/12 GHz) the standard antennas in the INTELSAT system are
required to operate above a minimum elevation angle of 10°.

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 Elevation Angle considerations
 Most satellite systems now, whether for the MSS or the FSS at frequencies above 10
GHz, tend to limit the elevation angle of the user to no less than 10° so that reliable
service can be provided.

 Given a minimum elevation angle and an orbital height, the geometry set up in Fig.2
can be used to develop a coverage area.

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 Elevation Angle considerations

Fig.2:Illustration of coverage area under a satellite.

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 Amity School of Engg &
Technology
M.Tech ECE, Semester II
Satellite Communication
Module 4 Lecture 3

Dr Sanmukh Kaur

22
 Learning Objectives & Outcomes

 To understand the principle of operation of GPS

 Ability to analyze the method for locating an unknown position by GPS.

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 GPS and its operation
 The basic requirement of a satellite navigation system like GPS is that there must be
four satellites transmitting suitably coded signals from known positions.

 Three satellites are required to provide the three distance measurements, and the
fourth is used to remove receiver clock error.

 Fig.1 shows the general arrangement of position location with GPS.

 The three satellites provide distance information when the GPS receiver makes three
measurements of range, Ri, from the receiver to three known points, that is, GPS
satellites.

 Each distance Ri can be thought of as the radius of a sphere with a GPS satellite
at its center.

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 GPS and its operation
 Fig.1: Position location
by trilateration:

 The aircraft must receive signals

from three GPS satellites to find
its location in three dimensions.

 The fourth GPS satellite signal

is required to correct
differences between the
satellite clock and the internal
clock of the GPS receiver.

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 GPS and its operation
 The receiver lies at the intersection of three such spheres, with a satellite at the
center of each sphere.

 Locally, at the receiver, the spheres will appear to be planes since the radii of the
spheres are very large.

 A basic principle of geometry is that the intersection of three planes completely

defines a point.

 Thus three satellites, through measurement of their distances to the receiver, define
the receiver location close to the earth’s surface.

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 GPS and its operation

 Although the principles by which GPS locates a receiver are very simple, requiring
only the accurate measurement of three ranges to three satellites, implementing the
measurement with the required accuracy is quite complex.

 Range is calculated from the time delay incurred by the satellite signal in traveling
from the satellite to the GPS receiver, using the known velocity of EM waves in free
space.

 To measure the time delay, we must know the precise instant at which the signal was
transmitted, and we must have a clock in the receiver that is synchronized to the
clock on the satellite

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 GPS and its operation

 GPS satellites each carry three atomic clocks, which are calibrated against time
standards in GPS control stations around the world.

 The result is GPS time, a time standard that is available in every GPS satellite.

 The accuracy of an atomic clock is typically 1 part in 1012.

 A standard crystal oscillator with a long term accuracy of 1 in 105 or 1 in 106 is used
in low cost civil GPS receivers.

 However, over the short time period in which GPS location measurements are made,
the oscillator is stable to one part in 1012.

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 GPS and its operation

 The receiver clock is allowed to have an offset relative to the GPS satellite clocks

 Suppose the receiver clock has an offset of 10 ms relative to GPS time.

 All distance measurements will then have an error of 3000 km.

 Clearly, we must have a way to remove the time error from the receiver clock before
we can make accurate position measurements.

 C/A code receivers can synchronize their internal clocks to GPS time within 10 ns,
corresponding to a distance measurement uncertainty of 3 m.
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 GPS and its operation
 Repeated measurements and integration improve the position location error to below
10 m.

 We need three time measurements to define the location of the receiver in the three
unknown coordinates x, y, and z.

 When we add a fourth time measurement ,we can solve the basic position location
equations for a fourth unknown – the receiver clock offset error τ (often called clock
bias).

 Thus the four unknowns in the calculation of the location of the receiver are x, y, z,
and τ.

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 Finding the position of GPS receiver: The Trilateration
Method
 One of the simplest and most accurate method is locating the unknown position by
The Trilateration Method.

 In this method, distance of the unknown point from three points is measured.

 The intersection of the arcs corresponding to three distances defines the unknown
point relative to the known points since three measurements can be used to solve
three equations to give following parameters for the receiver.
- longitude
- latitude
- elevation

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 The Trilateration Method
 In this method, distance between a transmitter and a receiver is estimated by
measuring the time taken by a pulse of RF energy to travel between the two.

 The distance is calculated by using velocity of electromagnetic waves in free space (

299,972,458 m/s).

 Time is measured electronically more accurately by the use of atomic clocks so that
the GPS position location system is able to achieve a measurement accuracy of 1
meter in a distance of 20, 000 Km.

 Position location accuracy can be obtained if timing measurements have an accuracy

better than 3 nano-seconds.

 This is achieved as:

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 Finding the position of GPS receiver: The Trilateration
Method
 Each satellite carries several high accuracy atomic clocks and radiates a sequence of
bits that starts at a precisely known time.

 A GPS receiver contains a clock that is synchronized in turn to the clock on each
satellite that it is receiving.

 The receiver measures the time delay of arrival of the bit sequence, which is
proportional to the distance between the satellite and the GPS receiver.

 After the distance of a GPS receiver from three satellites has been measured , it is
required to know the position of each satellite.

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 Finding the position of GPS receiver: The Trilateration
Method
 This is calculated in the GPS receiver using the ephemeris for satellite orbits that are
broadcast by each satellite in its navigation message.

 As the time at which the transmitted bit sequence is started is known at the receiver,
the position of the satellite at that time can be calculated from its orbital data.

 Apart from the three satellites , a fourth is also used because the clock in the receiver
is not inherently accurate enough .

 From the fourth distance measurement infromation, clock errors in the receiver can
be corrected and the receiver clock can be synchronized to the GPS time with an
accuracy better than 100 ns.

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 Amity School of Engg &
Technology
M.Tech ECE, Semester II
Satellite Communication
Module 4 Lecture 4

Dr Sanmukh Kaur

35
 Learning Objectives & Outcomes

 To understand the principle of operation of GPS and GPS accuracy requirements

 Ability to analyze the operation of GPS receiver by extraction of C / A code after

correction of Doppler shift

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 GPS Accuracy
 The position location process requires an accurate measurement of the time of
arrival of the code sequence at the receiver.

 The output of the C/A code correlator is a 1 s wide pulse that repeats every
millisecond.

 The accuracy with which a timing measurement can be made on a single pulse is
given by :

 Where t is the rms timing error , Bn is the noise bandwidth of the RF channel, and
S / N ratio is the signal-to-noise power ratio (not in dB) for the pulse in the noise
bandwidth Bn .

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 GPS Accuracy
 The S / N ratio after the correlator is

S / N = C / N + Gp - losses

 Where Gp is the correlator processing gain. For the C/A code Gp = 1023 = 30.1 dB and

S / N = -18.4 + 30.1 dB - losses

= 11.7 dB - losses

 If we assume losses of 1.7 dB, S/N = 10 dB, a power ratio of 10.

 The theoretical noise bandwidth of the correlator is Bn = 1 MHz (IF noise bandwidth) thus

t ≈ 1 / [106 10 ] = 0.316 µs

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 GPS Accuracy
 A higher C / N ratio in the receiver will improve the accuracy but other errors will lower the
accuracy.

 The accuracy achieved by commercial C / A code GPS receivers was better than expected by
the designers of the GPS system.

 Military strategies became concerned that C / A code GPS receivers could be used to target
weapons against the United states with considerable accuracy.

 The U.S. deptt of defense (DOD) introduced selective availability (SA), a scheme to
deliberately degrade the accuracy of C / A code receivers by varying some of the parameters
of GPS satellites.

 Selective availability may be switched off and may be turned on only if the security of the
US is threatened.

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 GPS Receiver operation

 A C / A code GPS receiver must be able to

- correlate signals from at least four satellites
- calculate time delays
- read the navigation message
- calculate the orbits of the GPS satellites
- calculate the positions from pseudoranges

 The key to accurate position determination is accuracy in the timing of arrival of the
Gold code sequences from each satellite in view.

 All GPS receivers use a microprocessor to make the required calculations and to
control the display of data.

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 GPS Receiver operation

 Most C / A code GPS receivers use an IC chip set that contains 12 parallel
correlators.

 This allows the receiver to process signals from upto 12 satellites at the same time,
which helps keep all the signals synchronized.

 The received GPS signals are converted to a suitable IF frequency in the front end
of the receiver, and then processed to recover the C/A codes.

 In most recent GPS receivers, much or all of the signal processing is done digitally
using DSP techniques.

 The IF signal in the GPS receiver will consists of the sum of (upto 12) of signals
from visible GPS satellites.
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 GPS Receiver operation
 The IF signal has several BPSK modulations applied to it by the satellite, and when
received on earth has been Doppler shifted by satellite and earth station.

 The equation for a C/A code signal from the ith satellite is a BPSK modulated IF
signal s(t)

s(t) = AiCi(t)Di(t)sin[2𝜋(fi + fd)t − 𝜑i]

 Where
- Ai is the amplitude of the received signal
- Ci(t) is the Gold code sequence at 1.023Mcps as a polar binary sequence
- Di(t) is the navigation message at 50 bps as a polar binary sequence
- fi is the nominal IF frequency of the received carrier in hertz
- fd is the Doppler shift of the received signal in hertz
- 𝜑i is the phase angle of the received signal in radians
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 GPS Receiver operation
 Part of a typical receiver structure for the GPS C/A code is shown in Fig.1. This is
simplified diagram of a non-coherent delay lock loop in functional block form.

 The IF input signal has two BPSK modulations: the C/A code and the navigation
message.

 The IF signal is digitized by two ADCs to generate I and Q channels and all signal
processing is performed in a dedicated integrated circuit.

 The function of the noncoherent delay lock loop is to set the frequency and phase of
the VCO that forms the local chip clock to align the received C/A code chip
transitions precisely with the locally generated chip sequence transitions.

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 GPS Receiver operation
 When the loop is locked with the correct C/A code, multiplying the IF signal by the
local generated C/A code removes the code modulation.

 The top channel is the punctual channel, the lower two channels run one half chip
ahead (early) and one half chip behind (late) the punctual channel.

 BPF2 and BPF3 have bandwidths of 1000 Hz; their outputs are routed to envelope
detectors that output the magnitude of the signal, but with opposite sign.

 Adding the early and late voltages indicates whether the C/A code is aligned
correctly.

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 GPS Receiver operation

Fig.1Non-coherent delay lock loop and navigation message recovery

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 GPS Receiver operation
 The output of the adder drives the chip clock VCO to move the C/A code into
alignment.

 The punctual channel drives a BPSK demodulator to recover the navigation

message.

 The punctual channel also has an envelope detector (D) that serves as a lock
indicator.

 Once lock is achieved, the bandwidth of BPF1 can be narrowed to 50 Hz and the
loop filter bandwidth can be reduced to a few hertz to ensure accurate tracking of the
C/A code timing.

46
 GPS Receiver operation
 The delay lock loop has three paths: punctual, early (half chip ahead), and late (half
chip behind).

 The punctual path corresponds to multiplication of the received signal at the IF

frequency after correction for Doppler shift, by the correctly timed C/A code for the
correct satellite.

 The early and late paths are used to steer the C/A code clock into phase with the
received signal to maximize the output of the punctual channel.

 Doppler shift affects the C/A code clock much less than the IF carrier, with a
maximum shift of 0.0026 Hz, but if left uncorrected will eventually cause the locally
generated C/A code to lose synchronization with the received signal.

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 GPS Receiver operation
 A VCO is used to generate the code clock so that a voltage derived from the sum of
the early and late channel outputs can be used to keep the VCO at the correct
frequency and phase as the Doppler shift of the satellite changes over time.

 The maximum duration that any one GPS satellite remains in view is about three
hours, so the Doppler shift of the received signal changes quite slowly, at less than
1Hz per second.

 A frequency lock loop is used to keep the receiver local oscillator at the correct
frequency to compensate for Doppler shift.

48
 Amity School of Engg &
Technology
M.Tech ECE, Semester II
Satellite Communication
Module 4 Lecture 5

Dr Sanmukh Kaur

49
 Learning Objectives & Outcomes

 To understand the importance and applications of GPS in civil and military

 Ability to analyze the operation of GPS receiver and appreciate the applications of
GPS

50
 GPS Receiver
 Fig.1 shows the schematic of C / A code GPS receiver.

 The antenna is a circularly polarized patch antenna with LNA mounted on it.

 The super-heterodyne receiver generates an IF signal in a bandwidth of about 2

MHz, which is sampled and processed using I and Q sampling techniques by A / D
converter and digital signal processing ( DSP) circuit.

 The digital portion of the receiver includes a C / A code generator and a correlator
which selects the necessary Gold sequences.

 The microprocessor carries out the timing measurements and calculate the
receiver’s position.

51
 GPS Receiver

52 Fig.1 Block diagram of a GPS Receiver

 GPS Applications

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 GPS Applications

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