Design, development and operation of a student ground station

Abstract: Design, Development and Operation of a student ground station is a Master
thesis project done at the Department of Space Science (IRV), Luleå
University of Technology, Sweden. The Objective of this degree project is to
develop and operate the IRV student ground station that operates within
amateur radio bands (VHF and UHF). Hardware and software were selected after
studying the existing student ground stations. Tokyo University CubeSat
XI-IV, CUTE-1 and XI-V were used for testing of the uplink and downlink
performance. Those experiments gave good results for Ax.25 packets and for CW
signals. Handover experiments were carried out to determine the importance of
the IRV ground station in a possible student ground station network. The
results showed that IRV ground station has a unique advantage due to its
location. SWR measurements were carried out for VHF and UHF antenna systems
that gave results below 2. It is observed that noise levels due to external
electromagnetic interferences in amateur radio bands are negligible.
Currently the IRV ground station is fully functional in VHF and UHF bands and
has the option of expanding to S band