Design, development and operation of a student ground station

Design, Development and Operation of a student ground station is a Master thesis project done at the Department of Space Science (IRV), Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. The Objective of this degree project is to develop and operate the IRV student ground station that operates within amateur radio bands (VHF and UHF). Hardware and software were selected after studying the existing student ground stations. Tokyo University CubeSat XI-IV, CUTE-1 and XI-V were used for testing of the uplink and downlink performance. Those experiments gave good results for Ax.25 packets and for CW signals. Handover experiments were carried out to determine the importance of the IRV ground station in a possible student ground station network. The results showed that IRV ground station has a unique advantage due to its location. SWR measurements were carried out for VHF and UHF antenna systems that gave results below 2. It is observed that noise levels due to external electromagnetic interferences in amateur radio bands are negligible. Currently the IRV ground station is fully functional in VHF and UHF bands and has the option of expanding to S bandValiderat; 20101217 (root