Advanced Autonomy for Low Cost Ground Stations

Over the past years many low cost ground stations were established in the scope of small satellite missions. In this context low cost means, that they are mainly composed of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf components. These ground stations are typically used from the associated research institutes to provide access to their small satellites. In the last years several projects were initiated to network these stations (e.g. the ESA project GENSO or the japanese GSN initiative). This paper describes in the first part autonomous functions, which are a key aspect for the success of low cost ground station networks. The second part explains how this concept was implemented for the ground station in Würzburg, which is utilized to communicate with the satellites of the UWE series.