International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1994 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / Small satellites have been perceived as having limited access to NASA's Space Network consisting of the TDR satellites and associated ground terminals. This paper presents the potential for access of the space network using basic small satellite design constraints and a simple helical antenna for the communications links. From the analysis derived through simulation of the orbit of both satellites, small satellites can be shown to have up to 30 minutes per orbit of single-TDRS access. Data rates on the order of 100 kbps are possible in this configuration with total daily data volumes in excess of 100 Mbits being achievable. Design parameters are given for a variety of orbital inclination angles and spacecraft transmission powers to illustrate the expected available contact time for such small satellites to the Space Network. This is compared with typical access time through a fixed ground station.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / In 1998, AlliedSignal Technical Services (ATSC) installed three fully autonomous 13-meter satellite tracking systems for the Integrated Program Office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at the Command and Data Acquisition Station near Fairbanks, Alaska. These systems track and command NOAA Polar Orbiting Weather Satellites and Defense Meteorological Satellites. Each tracking system operates for extended periods of time with little intervention other than periodic scheduling contacts. Schedule execution initiates equipment configuration, including establishing the RF communications link to the satellite. Station autonomy is achieved through use of a robust scheduler that permits remote users and the System Administrator to request pass activities for any of the supported missions. Spacecraft in the mission set are scheduled for normal operations according to the priority they have been assigned. Once the scheduler resolves conflicts, it builds a human-readable control script that executes all required support activities. Pass adds or deletes generate new schedule scripts and can be performed in seconds. The systems can be configured to support CCSDS and TDM telemetry processing, but the units installed at Fairbanks required only telemetry and command through-put capabilities. Received telemetry data is buffered on disk-storage for immediate, post-pass playback, and also on tape for long-term archiving purposes. The system can autonomously support up to 20 spacecraft with 5 different configuration setups each. L-Band, S-Band and X-Band frequencies are supported.

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Most contemporary modems provide a bit-oriented service at the physical layer of the OSI reference model. They do not provide any specific support for packet data transmission. A novel Hop-Aligned Slow Frequency Hopping (HA-SFH) concept is proposed to provide a packet traffic service in a Partial Band Jamming (PBJ) environment. Frequently, SFH is used together with deep interleaving and powerful Forward Error Correction (FEC) to combat PBJ. The proposed HA-SFH exploits the error control mechanism of the link layer packet protocol and reduces the data redundancy by using a low gain FEC, it results in a more bandwidth efficient system. The HA-SFH and deep interleaving SFH (DI-SFH) performance were analysed and compared by using a series of simulations and experiments employing a network simulator and hardware such as Viterbi decoders and a channel noise simulator, etc. The results are presented in terms of throughput and average frame delay, which are more meaningful qualities than BER for packet traffic. It shows concrete results that HA-SFH performs 2 times better than DI-SFH in terms of throughput under PBJ. This thesis also discusses a wide range of technical issues involving the implementation of HA-SFH such as the coding level required, protocol enhancement, networking traffic, adaptive FEC, channel state estimation, etc. It also explores an adaptive code rate system called the Smart Codec (SmCodec), which can be integrated into HA-SFH. The further development of the SmCodec also makes it a suitable system for use in commercial PSK modems to combat the effect of channel fading (eg. from rain). A new channel state estimation technique is also proposed. It estimates the channel state from the block error rate and the required estimation time is as low as 2 seconds for the most required range of E_b/N_o at a 64 kbps link (the estimation time decreases when the link speed increases).