Project for the design and construction of a LEO (Low Earth Orbit) Satellite Earth Station

The main objective of this thesis is to develop a fully functional and modular satellite ground station located in the ESEIAAT in order to track, monitor and do the housekeeping of current and future low earth orbit satellites operating in the UHF band.This main purpose of this project is to prepare a fully-operational Satellite Ground Station. Moreover, it also pursues to give a remote control capability to it. This has been done by designing and building two major blocks: the Hardware system and the Software system. In order to actually test the solution, the thesis participated in a real space mission by the hand of OpenCosmos Ltd. It was known that qb01, which is OpenCosmos first cubesat, will be launched during the development of this thesis. That is why, the ground station selected qb01 as its design point, while constantly trying to generate a solution as general as possible to any satellite. Therefore, a UHF band, half-duplex SDR based system for LEO satellites was designed. Finally, the system was verified by being used in real operations by the satellite operators