SSC99-IIB-2

Design of a Satellite Tracking Station

for Remote Operation and Multi-User
Observation

Mark Wilkinson
Graduate Student
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engr.
Utah State University
Logan, Utah 84322
[email protected]

Dr. Charles Swenson

Assistant Professor
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engr.
Utah State University
Logan, Utah 84322
[email protected]

Abstract . With the advent of LEO constella- allows an internet connection to the hardware
tions, the operation of multiple ground stations drivers. The design presented illustrates a
becomes an important factor in maintaining daemon process running on the Sun Solaris 2
several satellites. With a single ground sta- operating system. A graphical user interface
tion, the need to perform anomaly resolution (GUI) design was done in the Java program-
on a low-orbiting satellite becomes difficult ming language. With an embedded TCP/IP
with short view times and long durations client, compatibility is maintained between the
between revisit. The staffing of several C server and this Java client. The end-result is
ground stations or specialized remote-opera- a ground station that can be operated via
tion equipment can be cost prohibitive. telepresence through a Java applet.

This paper discusses the design of a satellite Such a design will allow the operation of
ground station at Utah State University (USU) multiple low-orbiting satellites, the utilization
that can be remotely operated over the of several uplink points, all from any internet
internet. The design of this ground station node. Without a requirement for special
outlines software drivers for controlling equipment, the operation of an experimental
hardware through a computer interface. A satellite or an entire satellite constellation
server daemon design is given that provides becomes more cost effective.
connections for multiple users. This server

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Wilkinson, Mark 13th Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites
 Introduction experience for graduate and undergraduate
students in space technology.
This paper is a summary of work performed
for the completion of a Masters of Science The preliminary design includes a combina-
Degree in Electrical Engineering. The author tion GPS receiver and intersatellite crosslink
of this paper completed this work in absentia being developed by the Applied Physics Lab
while working professionally as an engineer. of Johns Hopkins University for NASA. This
unit provides absolute and relative location of
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research the satellites in the constellation for navigation
(AFOSR), the Defense Advance Research though the global positioning system (GPS).
Projects Agency, the National Aeronautics and Data can be cross-linked through the system
Space Administration (NASA), and industry allowing one spacecraft in the constellation to
partners are sponsoring the launch of 10 act as master to control the constellation
university nanosatellites in late 2001.7 Three dynamics. Alternatively, data can be ex-
of the universities participating in this pro- changed such that the satellites can act more
gram, Utah State University, Virginia Poly- independently and use distributed control to
technic Institute and State University (Virginia maintain the constellation.
Tech), and University of Washington, have
formed a team to fly their satellites as a small All three of the satellites in ION-F will be
constellation. The three satellites are to fly in controlled by two ground stations located at
a leader follower (a.k.a. string-of-pearls) Utah State University and Virginia Tech.
configuration and make measurements of the These two ground stations have wide geo-
ionosphere (Figure 1). The project contains graphic separation and provide sufficient
barely enough funding for spacecraft hard- access time for the mission. It was desirable to
ware. Most labor on all three
satellites is being donated by
professionals, faculty, and
students.

This constellation has been

given the mission name ION-F
for Ionospheric Observation
Nanosatellite Formation. There
are four objectives of the
mission. First, demonstrate the
control of a nanosatellite forma-
tion using passive and active
means. Second, make the first
multi-satellite measurements of
the ionosphere. Third, demon-
strate new technologies for
satellite intercommunication
and relative position determina-
tion. Fourth, provide hands-on
Figure 1. ION-F Constellation

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2 13th Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites
develop technology that
would enable Washington Downlink Allocation Summary
University to remotely use Attitude
Utah State University's Control Horizon
ground station. Addition- Status Sensor Crosslink
ally, the USU ground
station is dedicated solely GPS Inertial
to the ION-F program. Scintillation Guidance
Because the Earth-space
link may require a unique
design that Virginia Tech
may not be able to use, the
Sun Sensor
advantages of having a
single common ground Monitors Plasma
station became somewhat Impedance
apparent. Of course, a Magnetome Probe
single ground station
would only be feasible if
ter
all three universities could Figure 2. Composition of satellite telemetry and data.
remotely access and
simultaneously use it.

The system developed and prototyped to Passes over the two ground stations will be
satisfy these desires is applicable to many divided into turns between the three satellites.
challenges of constellation control. For the first few months of the mission all
three satellites, from the perspective of the
The system, as it stands now, only gives the ground station, will be in the sky at the same
user the ability to control the dish track. The time. A single dish can only track one of the
telemetry has been designed, and will be satellites. In addition, only one satellite will
developed as hardware is selected. The Ion-F be allowed to use the downlink frequency at a
Satellites will have full uplink and downlink time to prevent interference. Thus an entire
capability to the ground stations at Utah State overpass will be assigned to one of the three
University and Virginia Tech. The system will satellites.
be built around commercial aerospace parts
and will leverage off of the Utah State Univer- Simulations for computing the times and
sity Space Dynamics Lab's experience in duration of overpasses show that an average
telemetry systems. The system will be all collection data rate of about 800 bits/s can be
digital using simple frequency shift keying for supported on each of the ION-F satellites.
modulation. A 10 kbit uplink is proposed at Given the two ground stations and a 100 kbit
around 450 MHz and a 100 kbit downlink is downlink, the on board storage requirements
proposed within S-band. Each of the three of the satellites under this scenario are about
satellites will use the same telemetry formats 20 Mbytes. The breakdown of telemetry and
and share the same frequency allocations. data is shown in Figure 2.

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Wilkinson, Mark 13th Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites
Despite the fact that the telemetry link is not Because the complexity of this system exists
yet operational, the potential value of the primarily in software, it is very inexpensive to
ground station design has been demonstrated. obtain. The ability to operate this system over
The system was designed to permit the sup- the public internet reduces its cost to a mere
port of a short satellite pass where predeter- pittance. Of course, using the public internet
mined commands are uploaded, and telemetry to operate this system puts several segments of
and data are downloaded to a repository for the link out of the control of the satellite
later collection and analysis. With this meth- operators. In a more critical satellite system,
odology, the bandwidth requirements between this can be intolerable.
the remote operator location and the ground
station position are very low. Specifically, the Private dedicated communications links can
bandwidth demands for the station telemetry be used instead of the internet. While this will
can be met with a data transfer rate of 1000 certainly increase monthly operations costs,
bits per second. To put this in perspective, the the cost will be offset by the reduction in
data communications requirement between the manpower.
operator and the station can be met with a
1200 baud modem. Real-time reporting of In even this prototype design, this system has
satellite telemetry will increase the bandwidth the capability to support a significant constel-
demand, but it will not be significant for a lation. The communications links for several
small satellite. satellites from many ground stations can be
established from a single operator position or
Additionally, because the requirements of this multiple operator positions. From widely
particular system are very relaxed, and be- dispersed geographical locations, one operator
cause the system is automated to a certain can control and several observers can monitor
degree, short lags inherent in using the multiple satellite passes. Significant additions
internet are tolerable. This system, in Utah would need to be made, however, to provide
State University's application, will be fully continuous real-time monitoring. Such a
operational using a standard low-bandwidth system would also require a much broader
internet connection. bandwidth.

There are several applications of this system

to industry, and many of the shortcomings of
this prototype system can be easily overcome.

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 Figure 3. Utah State University Ground Station Pedestal and Dish

The Design harmony over a network system. The most

expensive component of the design is, of
The satellite ground system consists of a course, the reflector and pointing control of
Parallax 12’ parabolic reflector mounted to a the ground station. The other major compo-
Bendix GMD-1 pedestal. The dish and pedes- nent of the system is a UNIX workstation that
tal are shown in Figure 3. The pedestal manages communications between the ground
contains the control electronics. Aside from station and the multiple users. While it is
these control electronics, there is a UNIX conceivable that a personal class computer
workstation that communicates with the could possibly handle this task, the reliability
tracking station users over an internet connec- and multi-user restrictions make it undesir-
tion. able.

This system operates by utilizing several Using a UNIX workstation, particularly a high
different computer programs operating in class workstation such as a Sun, Hewlett-

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Wilkinson, Mark 13th Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites
Packard, or Silicon Graphics machine, may between the network and the embedded
create some cost concerns. These concerns microcontroller. Third, there is the operator's
are unwarranted. The system used to proto- computer, of which there may be several. In
type the Utah State University ground station the completed system, there will also be a
was a low-end Sun SPARC workstation that radio transceiver connected to the UNIX
was purchased and refurbished for under workstation. Figure 4 illustrates these compo-
$1000.00. Additionally, unlike heritage nents.
systems, this design requires only a single
workstation. It is used as the intermediary In our prototype design the first component,
between the ground station and the operators. the embedded controller, is a Tattletale 8
The computers used by operators can be microcontroller. It is based on the Motorolla
simple personal class computers, including 68332 microcontroller. This embedded
Macintosh or Wintel systems as well as UNIX controller receives position information about
workstations. Operators can even work on the satellite dish through two quadrature,
laptop computers through a modem connec- relative position, optical encoders. One reads
tion. azimuth; the other reads elevation. Position
control of the dish is accomplished through
There are three major computing components pulse-width modulation of two DC motors;
to this system. First, there is the again, one for azimuth and the other for
microcontroller embedded in the station elevation. An ephemeris table, which includes
pedestal. Second, there is a workstation time, desired azimuth, and desired elevation,

Figure 4. Operators, a workstation, and the pedestal are the three primary components of the
ground station.

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6 13th Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites
is received from the workstation through full- there are as many spawned processes as there
duplex, asynchronous, serial communications are users, which self-terminate when the user
using the RS-232 standard. The disconnects. The spawned process handles
microcontroller also transmits position and login requests to the ground station tracking
status information to the workstation through system, and it passes command and telemetry
this same link. between the driver daemon and the operator's
display.
The second component of our prototype
design uses a low-end Sun SPARC worksta- The third system component is the operator's
tion. While the workstation used in this computer. As mentioned, this can be almost
design operates on the Solaris 2 system, this any type of platform, including UNIX,
code can be ported to many UNIX platforms. Macintosh, and Wintel. The operator must be
There are two segments of the workstation able to operate under the Java environment
code. Segment A is a driver daemon; segment and must download the ground station user
B is a server daemon. display from the ground station computer.
While the other programs in this system were
Daemon processes are discussed in more written in combinations of assembly and C,
detail later in this paper. Suffice it to say both the user display was written in the Java pro-
of these processes operate as part of the UNIX gramming language. Not only does this give
operating system. User interaction is not the flexibility to run on multiple platforms, but
necessary to start nor maintain them. it removed the computationally intensive task
of maintaining the user display from the
The driver daemon is the communications UNIX workstation. Instead, the user display
point between the dish-embedded resides on the operator's computer. Because
microcontroller and the server daemon. The the display provides only a view of the infor-
driver daemon passes commands and ephem- mation arriving from the workstation, as well
eris to the microcontroller, it collects telem- as buttons for commanding the workstation,
etry from the microcontroller, and it deter- there is no concern about the performance
mines user privileges for each operator. limitations of Java. The user display commu-
Communication to the microcontroller is nicates with the workstation server daemon
through an RS-232 serial interface using a through the abstract socket interface over the
custom protocol. Communication to the internet. It uses a custom protocol built on top
server daemon is through UNIX SVR4 IPC of the TCP/IP stack.
(System V, Release 4, Interprocess Communi-
cations) using a custom protocol. Microcontroller Design

The server daemon is the gateway for opera- During the development of this design, the
tors desiring connection with the ground conclusion was reached that the control law
station. Every time a user requests connection should be implemented on a microcontroller
with the system, the server daemon spawns a embedded in the dish pedestal. The Tattletale
duplicate process to handle the connection Model 8 microcontroller made by Onset
request. It then remains idle, waiting for Corporation was selected to provide this
additional connection requests. The spawned control. The Tattletale 8 is based on the
process handles the user's connection. There Motorolla 68332 microcontroller with addi-
is one daemon process always running, and tional peripheral electronics. Motor drivers

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Wilkinson, Mark 13th Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites
and power isolation circuits were added to the Workstation Daemons
system which was installed in the pedestal.
The term daemon is applied to any UNIX
The microcontroller provides only three process that runs in the background. As
functions: First, it provides communications opposed to a program that runs in the fore-
to the workstation. Second, it determines the ground, a daemon process has no user interac-
azimuth and elevation of the satellite dish tion through standard channels. A daemon
from two quadrature, relative, optical encod- process is invisible to the user. Typically,
ers. Third, it determines the desired position these processes are always running, and wait
of the dish and controls two DC motors with for some event to occur that they service.
pulse-width modulation to establish this
position. In the case of the USU Satellite Ground
Station, both daemon processes are started
Communications between the microcontroller with the operating system when the computer
and the workstation occur over an RS-232 is powered up. When started, each daemon
connection.4 This provides asynchronous, process immediately duplicates itself in
full-duplex communications at 9600 bps. The memory with the fork function. The original
microcontroller transmits status and position parent process creates a child process. The
to the workstation; the workstation transmits parent process then terminates itself. The
commands and ephemeris tables to the operating system will detect that the child
microcontroller. process has been orphaned. In the server
daemon, this child becomes the parent to each
Ephemeris received from the workstation user connection.
includes system time, azimuth position, and
elevation position. Data points are generally When a child process is orphaned, the operat-
separated by one second, but this interval can ing system adopts the child process with its
vary. Using three ephemeris points, the initial system process (init). This has the
microcontroller determines intermediate effect of making the daemon process a part of
points using a cubic spline. the operating system. The child process also
performs several other functions that protect it
Accurate time is obtained by the from outside computer resources; it is buried
microcontroller from the workstation. Cur- even deeper into the operating system.1
rently the workstation receives its time via the
NIST (National Institute of Standards–Time) This child process, the daemon, is completely
service. This service periodically updates the invisible to the user. For a system administra-
time on the workstation from a national tor, it is very difficult to identify and maintain
standard. The closest location of this standard a daemon process; it is almost impossible to
to the USU ground station in located in Den- diagnose a malfunctioning daemon. To
ver, Colorado. While network latencies circumvent this problem, the daemon process
between Denver, Colorado and Logan, Utah creates a self-identifying lock file in a known
are considered when updating the time, accu- directory. Using the syslog service in the
racy may be improved by adding a global UNIX operating system, messages are created
position system (GPS) receiver to the worksta- by the daemon process and stored in the same
tion. Accurate time would then be obtained directory. Both notices and error messages are
from the GPS constellation. recorded in this file. These system message

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logs will enable the system administrator to not need to execute additional commands
diagnose erroneous or fatal behavior of the between issuing the print command and
daemon. collecting the paper from the printer, but
between these user actions, the printer daemon
A good example of a UNIX daemon is a executes a large number of very complicated
printer driver. The daemon does nothing until commands.
a print request is made. When a request is
made, it services the request by gathering the There are two daemons in the ground station
data from the user's application program, system. Figure 5 illustrates the communica-
processing the data, and then passing the data tion paths between the two daemons, the dish
to the printer in a new format. The user does tracking electronics, and the users.

Figure 5. The server daemon with three users and the driver daemon with their communica-
tion paths—TCP/IP sockets, IPC shared memory, IPC message queue, and serial connections.

Driver Daemon Details When a user connects to the ground station

system, they are immediately given permis-
The driver daemon was created to service sion to observe the system. They are unable
information between the ground station to issue commands. Observer is the lowest
hardware and the server daemon processes permission level. Operator is the next level of
created when users log in. While the user access. An operator is given the ability to add
interface restricts commands, the driver missions to the ground station. A mission is a
validates the permission level of each com- command to track a satellite at a given date
mand. Unauthorized commands will be and time. The operator provides the ephem-
rejected if the user does not have the proper eris through their user interface.
access level.
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Wilkinson, Mark 13th Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites
The final permission level is technician. In The second service is called a message queue.
addition to having all operator permissions, It is a location in system memory where
the technician has the ability to shutdown the messages are transmitted by one process and
system at any time, move the dish to its lock- retrieved by another. Message identifiers
down position, calibrate the dish pointing prevent the messages from being inadvertently
angle, change the station's geospatial coordi- retrieved by the wrong process. Server pro-
nates, and manually command the slewing of cesses receive this identifier when the user
the dish. attaches to the system. Unlike the shared
memory, the driver must service every mes-
On a side note, any person has the ability, sage that is sent. The speed of the computer
through a restricted shell login, to prevent or hosting the driver will restrict the maximum
allow movement commands to the dish. This number of users. The maximum number of
is needed when the dish position is locked users allowed is set by the system administra-
down because of wind conditions or disuse. tor when the driver is installed into the system.
The restricted shell login will only be accepted
from the main terminal located in the locked Server Daemon Details
ground station lab adjacent to the dish.
While the server daemon has all the functions
Efforts to force commands to the ground necessary to service a user connection, it does
station system through hacking the ground not do this. Instead, the server daemon simply
station user interface will be detected by the waits for connections. When a connection
driver. As mentioned, the user interface request is made, the server spawns out a child.
restricts commands, but permissions are The server then goes back to simply waiting
validated by the driver. Hacking the user for connections. This new child process,
interface cannot circumvent security. which is almost identical to the original
parent, then services the user. When the user
The driver reports a constant set of informa- completes their session, the child process then
tion to all users. It also accepts individual terminates itself.
messages from each user and transmits spe-
cific messages to individual users. This capa- The process of servicing internet connection
bility is accomplished through the UNIX requests can be accomplished by the UNIX
Interprocess Communications (IPC) service.2 Internet Supervisor daemon (inetd). With
inetd, a daemon process is much simpler to
For the constant set of information that is sent develop. Unfortunately, there is a perfor-
to all users, the driver uses a shared memory mance loss.9 Because the UNIX computer
location. Several times every second, this used in the ground station is dedicated solely
information is updated. It includes the azi- to one purpose, the server daemon was devel-
muth and elevation of the dish as well as oped to run independent of the UNIX Internet
system time. Because the shared memory is Supervisor. This gives it better performance.
handled by the operating system, each of the
server processes servicing users is able to The server daemon can spawn as many chil-
obtain this information without querying the dren as it needs to service an equal number of
driver. This helps protect the driver from users. Only the driver daemon has the ability
being overloaded by user requests.

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to limit the number of users by commanding is the main reason the server daemon spawns a
the user’s display program to close itself. separate process for each user: The communi-
cation interface between the server daemon
As discussed in the previous section, the and user display is connection-oriented. This
server uses the UNIX Interprocess Communi- is in contrast to User Datagram Protocol,
cations (IPC) library for communicating with Internet Protocol (UDP/IP) which is
the driver. Common information such as connectionless.4
azimuth, elevation, and time is placed in a
system shared memory location by the driver. In providing the interface between the driver
The server retrieves this information several daemon and the user's display, the server
times a second and transmits it along to the provides another very important function.
user display. Because the core system—meaning the driver
daemon and the server daemon—consists of C
When the user display needs to transmit programs residing on a UNIX machine, and
information to the driver daemon, the server because the user display is a Java program
passes information through a message queue, residing on another machine, there needs to be
another IPC service. A login command or an a set of functions that convert Java standard-
ephemeris table are examples of messages that ized datatypes to nonstandard UNIX
would be sent from the user display to the datatypes.5,10 The server provides these
driver daemon. The driver sends information functions.
back to the user display through the message
queue also. Such a message can cause the The UNIX datatypes used in this application
user to automatically log out, or it can activate follow the standard established under Sun
controls on the display that were previously Solaris 2. Single byte UNIX character types
restricted. Once again, the server is the and string elements are converted to Java
intermediary. The server polls the message standard two-byte unicode characters. Java
queue and transmits any messages along to the booleans and byte integers are converted to
user display. UNIX signed short integers, Java short inte-
gers are converted to UNIX C integers, and
Communication between the server daemon Java integers are converted to UNIX long
and the user display is quite different. It relies integers. Fortunately, Java float and double
on a standard internet connection. The ground types follow the same format as UNIX float
station uses a custom protocol built on the and double types. Unfortunately there are
Transmission Control Protocol, Internet some incongruities. Java does not have
Protocol (TCP/IP) stack that is registered in unsigned integers types, and UNIX C does not
the UNIX machine’s services database.8 This have a standard equivalent of the Java long
protocol is used to send information between integer. Special handling was required for
the server daemon and the user interface. This these complexities.

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Wilkinson, Mark 13th Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites
 User Display Details management frame, a station position frame,
and a station pointing frame. A fifth frame has
The user display was written to conform to been reserved on the display to support the
Java 1.1. Because of its relative young age addition of a satellite status and transceiver
and limited support by applications and interface frame.
operating systems, Java 1.2 was not used. The
Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT) was used This mission time frame gives the year, day of
to construct the display, not the native looking year, hour, minute, and seconds in military
Swing toolkit.3 The display is shown in format Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the
Figure 6. standard used in aeronautics and astronautics.
When the user display is started, an offset is
The user display contains several regions. determined to obtain the difference between
There is a mission time frame, a mission the ground station system time and the user's

Figure 6. The User Display.

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12 13th Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites
system time. The mission clock then uses the As mentioned in the previous section, the
time service on the local machine rather than server daemon provides the service of unit
taxing the resources of the ground station translation between the Solaris implementa-
computer. tion of UNIX datatypes and the Java standard
for datatypes. Nevertheless, special handling
The mission management frame serves two is required to get data from the network
purposes. First, it tabulates the missions connection to the user display. Data arrives to
currently stored. This information is publicly the user display in a stream of data. This
available. Second, it provides an interface for stream of data is reliably delivered to the user
adding or deleting missions. This action by the TCP/IP service. It is, however, just a
requires the user to have at least operator stream of bytes. The user display identifies
permissions. Currently missions can only be the message stream from its first few bytes.
added by downloading an ASCII format Based on this identification, the stream is then
ephemeris table. The capability exists, how- assembled into meaningful datatypes—
ever, to interface the user display directly to integers, floats, strings, etc.
Satellite Tool Kit (STK).
The converse is true when sending informa-
STK is a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) tion through the network connection. The
product. The core product is an excellent tool information to be sent is dissolved into indi-
for generating satellite ephemeris. Addition- vidual bytes and reassembled as a stream of
ally, is available for free download and use bytes. It is given an identifier and then trans-
from Analytical Graphics, Inc. Additional mitted over the network. Provisions have
modules can be purchased that expand the been added in the protocol to implement error-
capability of STK. One of these modules, checking, ensuring data was not corrupted
STK-Connect, enables another program to during transmission. This has not been neces-
communicate with STK through a TCP/IP sary because of the reliability of TCP/IP and
interface. The user’s display could be further has not been implemented.
developed to include this capability.
Future Developments
The position of the dish is reported in the
station position frame. This includes not only Currently, there is only one ground station that
the azimuth and elevation pointing of the dish, uses this system. It is the station at Utah State
but the geospatial coordinates of the dish- University. If other locations were to adopt
latitude, longitude, and altitude. This informa- this software into their ground stations, the
tion, including the geospatial coordinates, is user display would be able to select the
provided to the user display from the driver ground station, from a list of stations, to which
daemon. Therefore, a user display can be it would connect. This is a very powerful
adjusted to connect to any number of ground feature that can be easily added. For a more
stations. The display will properly report the complex satellite system where more ground
position of the ground station to which it is stations are needed, all ground stations can be
connected. For those with proper privileges, controlled from a single terminal. One user
manual commanding of the dish position can window can swap between multiple ground
be performed. The desired position and a stations or multiple user windows can be
maximum motor duty cycle are specified. opened to monitor and control each of the
ground stations.

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Wilkinson, Mark 13th Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites
After the satellite design has been finalized Source Code Licensing
and a transceiver for the satellite has been
selected, capability to communicate with the The source code for this system is available
ground station transceiver will be added to the from its author, Mark Wilkinson. The code is
user interface; space has been set-aside in the not in the public domain; it must be licensed.
current interface for this addition. This will Licenses are free but require a license agree-
compete the design objective of being able to ment with the author. The license agreement
operate a satellite from a remote location. basically states that any improvements to the
system must be given to the author so that
In its present implementation, ephemeris can they may, at the author's discretion, be incor-
only be provided to the system in the form of porated into the baseline for further distribu-
an ASCII table. As mentioned earlier, it is tion. The license agreement also places some
anticipated that an interface to Satellite Tool provisions on its use in commercial systems,
Kit will be created using the STK-Connect and it prohibits redistribution of the code.
module and a TCP/IP interface. This would Contact the author for a copy of the source
greatly simplify ground station operation and code and the license agreement.
would reduce operating costs, as operators
would not require as much training. The author can most reliably be contacted
through his email address at
Because of recent construction, the physical "[email protected]". It is anticipated
location of the satellite dish will need to be this email address will be valid throughout his
moved. Currently there is a restriction that the lifetime.
workstation must be located within 50 feet of
the dish to accommodate the RS-232 commu- Summary
nications between the workstation and the
embedded microcontroller. This requirement This ground station will be used to operate the
can be circumvented by adding a modular ION-F satellite constellation being developed
RS-232 to ethernet converter. This may need by Utah State University, Virginia Tech, and
to be done to accommodate a new location for the University of Washington. These satellites
the dish. While the workstation and will, among other objectives, demonstrate
microcontroller will need to be collocated on formation flying. The ground station will
the same subnet, this will allow a much demonstrate the capability to monitor and
greater physical separation. control several satellites with one station and
several users.
There is some desire to demonstrate a degree
of pointing accuracy that is not necessary for The station design incorporates a core UNIX
this project. This may be pursued in the future. program that operates as a system daemon
process. It provides communication between
The current time base for the system, which is multiple users and a the control electronics in
acquired using the NIST service over the the pedestal of the satellite tracking system.
internet, may not be sufficient. If it is neces- The user display was programed in Java with
sary to improve the accuracy of the time base, an internet socket; it can connect from any
a GPS receiver may be added. Time would internet node, using many types of computers,
then be obtained with higher accuracy from to the ground station.
the GPS satellite constellation.

Wilkinson, Mark
14 13th Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites
While this design utilizes the public internet, a 5. Horstmann, Cay S. and Gary Cornell.
dedicated connection can be established for Core Java 1.1, Volume l: Fundamentals. Sun
more demanding applications. Microsystems Press, A Prentice Hall Title,
Mountain View, California,1997.
The ground station architecture provides
several possible advantages. Several un- 6. Liu, Cricket, Jerry Peek, Russ Jones,
manned ground stations can be operated by a Bryan Buus, and Adrian Nye. Managing
one or more users in a remote location. A INTERNET Information Services. O'Reilly &
ground station can even be operated over a Associates, Inc., Sebastopol, California,1994.
modem connection from a laptop. With this
capability, the cost of operating a large, low 7. Martin, Maurice, Howard Schlossberg,
Earth orbit constellation can be greatly re- Joe Mitola, et. al. “University Nanosatellite
duced. In addition to reducing manpower Program.” IAF Symposium, Redondo Beach,
requirements at remote stations, the hardware California, April 19-21,1999.
costs are much less, and bandwidth costs can
be very economical by using the internet. 8. Solaris 2.6, TCP/IP and Data Commu-
nications Administration Guide. Sun
A free license for this software can be ob- Microsystems, Mountain View, Califor-
tained from the author. The operation of nia,1997.
ION-F in late 2001 will demonstrate the
capabilities of this ground station. Until this 9. Stevens, W. Richard. UNIX Network
time, further developments will be made, and Programming. Prentice Hall, Englewood
the transceiver interface will be integrated. Cliffs, New Jersey, 1990.

References 10. Sun Workshop, C User’s Guide, C

Compiler 4.2. Sunsoft, Inc., Mountain View,
1. Comer, Douglas E. and David L. California, 1996.
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Wilkinson, Mark 13th Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites
Wilkinson, Mark
16 13th Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites