Revised Project Proposal

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Mobile Ground Station Proposal Prepared for: Mahmud Rahman, Phd Prepared by: Paulo Borges, Kris Sanford December 5, 2013 Proposal number: 01 !

SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY !Problem Statement

The current ground control architecture used by the Robotic Systems Laboratory (RSL) at Santa Clara University uses a static facility to communicate with NASA nanosatellites, confining the satellite contacts to whenever the satellite is overhead. For our design project we are attempting to build a satellite communication station using the software defined radio architecture that is housed in a mobile vehicle to allow for communication at remote locations. A mobile satellite communication station would increase the number of potential satellite contacts as well as provide the ability for contacts with higher elevation.

Project Objective

The purpose of our project is to design a software defined radio system and implement it in the Mobile Ground Station. The project includes the design of a receptor which the operator could access and easily execute the steps required to establish a satellite communication within 10 minutes, which is the time range our customers require. The system includes a USB dongle (FunCube Dongle) capable of performing band selection, filtering, and mixed signal capabilities. A low noise pre amplifier will increase the strength of the receptor maximizing the performance of the overall system. The antenna plays an essential role in the design and its directional functionality will be coupled to a tracking system capable of point the structure directly to the satellite position. An easy way of integrating the software and designing a LCD display for a graphical design interface is to integrate our project into a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Although the processing power is enough to process all the data and perform the decodification and demodulation of the signal, our design chose to include a general purpose processor (GPP) to specifically do signal control and digital signal processing. The hardware and software that will be on the completed mobile ground station will allow for interoperability which is the capability of communicating with multiple satellites (in fact, radios); cognitive radio which increases the available spectrum, and it can adapt the waveform to maximize a key metric.

Technical Background

This project will utilize a Yagi-Uda antenna to perform MMO, Beam forming, and Nulling. The antenna is a directional antenna consisting of a driven element dipole element and additional parasitic elements which consists of a reflector and a director. The only excited element of the antenna is the dipole element and all the other elements help to either reflect or transmit energy in a particular direction. The Mast Mount Omnidirectional (MMO) property) provides outstanding coverage in a rugged U.V. stable, plastic radome with an aluminum base that is ideal for indoor or outdoor applications.


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The USB dongle, FunCube, will perform the band selection, down conversion data rate, and A/D conversion. The hardware itself allows to operate the device in the 100 MHz to 1 GHz region. Our goal aims a 430 Mhz communication with satellites, which according to the Nyquist Criterion, the project requires a sampling frequency of at least 860 MHz. The down conversion process converts a digitized real signal centered at 430 MHz to a basebanded complex signal centered at zero frequency. This process is required for a lower processing period. The Digital Signal Processing will be performed using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The acquisition, demodulation, tracking, synchronization, and decoding will be performed using the processor of the FPGA and some tasks will be redirected to the General Purpose Processor. The Xilinx Spartan-3A DSP with DSP48A Slice FPGA is the primary option for this project since the on-chip microcontroller is active upon power-up and does not require the FPGA to be programmed. In that way, there is no need of developing any extra drivers to turn on the GPP when the FPGA is initialized. Along the 2,200 Gbps memory bandwith, this solution has 53,172 logic cells and 519 I/O pins which is enough power processing to establish a solid and robust connection at 430 MHz. Finally, the data gathered from the satellite and process by our system could possibly be hosted in a MySQL database and the FPGA could be connected through an Ethernet port to insert that data into the online Database. !Methods

The team will purchase the development kit board in the Fall quarter. There will be used the GNU Radio development platform to generate the C and C++ scripts which will run in the FPGA. The Mechanical sub team will simultaneously be working on implementing the Yagi-Uda antenna on the Recreational Vehicle and they will provide the tracking data for the FPGA to add a real time satellite tracking feature into the system. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


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SCHEDULE !

Grant Chart!!!!!!!!!!

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Budget

ClassificationPart Name / Description

Vendor Part Number Cost QTY Total

Workstation

Rack Mount Computer (tracking, ops)

SuperLogics

SL-1U-CL-M900-LA

399 3 1197

Hardware, Data

RS232-RS485 Bidirectional Converter

Jameco 117701 59.69 2 119.38

AntennaS-Band Antenna Suite

RF Ham Design 5000 1 5000

Cabling, Connector

Rotor, Receptical, Male, 4 Conductor, Weatherproof

Digi-Key HR1125-ND 11.7 2 23.4

Cabling, Connector

Rotor, Plug, Female, 4 Conductor

Digi-Key HR1768-ND 12.78 4 51.12

Cabling, Connector

Rotor, Receptical, Male, 4 Conductor

Digi-Key HR1778-ND 8.83 2 17.66

Connector, Data

Data Feedthru, Plug 10 wires (data)

Digi-KeyPT06SE12-10S(470)

31.32 1 31.32

Connector, Power

Power Feedthru, Plug 3 wires (power)

Digi-KeyPT06A-12-3S(470)

28.34 1 28.34

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Cabling, Connector

DB9 (Female) / DB25 Adaptor (Male)

Fry's 508835 2.99 1 2.99

Cabling, Connector

DB9 (Male) / DB25 (Male)

Fry's 5088855 2.99 1 2.99

Cabling, Data

USB <-> Serial Converter, Airlink

Fry's 4071282 14.99 2 29.98

Cabling, Data

DB9 (Male) / DB9 (Female)

Fry's 5289447 6.99 1 6.99

Cabling, Power

Extension cord, 3-outlet, short

Fry's 3783056 1.99 1 1.99

Mobile VehicleRecreational Vehicle

- - ~$8000 1 8000

WorkstationRack Mount Tray

Fry's 2222638 39.99 3 119.97

Cabling, RF

LMR600, N-Male to N-Male, 15ft length

Talley TIMA60A-XX 78.1 1 78.1

Hardware, Interface ICOM CT-17 HRO - 129.95 1 129.95

Hardware, Interface

Kantronics 9612 Plus TNC Modem

HRO - 369.95 1 369.95

Hardware, Power ICOM PS-125 HRO - 299.95 1 299.95

Hardware, Radio ICOM 910H HRO - 1279.95 1 1279.95



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Workstation

Operations Computer

Dell OPTIPLEX 9010 900 1 900

Total: 17691.03



Documents

Revised Project Proposal