A distributed orbital measurement instrument for link quality assurance

The development of Nano- and Picosattelites for educational and scientific purposes becomes more and more popular. As these satellites are very small, highly integrated devices and are therefore not equipped with high-gain antennas, the data transmission between ground and satellite is vulnerable to several ascendancies in both directions. Another handicap is the low earth orbit where the satellites are usually located as it keeps the communication time frame very short. To counter these disadvantages, the global educational network for satellite operations (GENSO) has been created. To optimize the communication between ground station and satellite, metrics and methods have to be identified to gain information about the satellite link quality during a ground pass. Such a global effort is hindered by utilization of very different hardware, protocols, frequencies and modulations. This paper shows a generic and widely applicable approach to passively measure and compare satellite link quality to be applied in a heterogeneous ground station and satellite configuration.