Design and Implementation of High Performance BPSK Demodulator for Satellite Communications

The Delfi program is a development line of small satellites comprising the successful Delfi-C3 and Delfi-n3Xt CubeSat missions. As part of an effort to involve radio amateurs from all over the world, a telemetry client is designed which allows radio amateurs to demodulate, decode and display telemetry data. This software was designed for an RF front-end connected to a sound card acting as low-end baseband sampling device. It has been discovered that there was a significant gap of 5 dB between the required Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) for the software demodulator and the theoretical required link margin. This thesis presents an approach which decreases this gap while upgrading the demodulator for future use, taking advantage of emerging capabilities of Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology.Space Systems EngineeringAerospace Engineerin