FPGA Design, Implementation, and Breadboard Development of an Innovative SCCC Telemetry + Pseudo-Noise Ranging Satellite System

In recent years, missions requiring payload telemetry data transmission to ground stations have increasingly demanded a higher bandwidth. Traditional ranging techniques for spacecraft position determination often use a dedicated spectrum, reducing the available bandwidth for telemetry. To overcome this limitation, a transmission system capable of simultaneously sending high data-rate telemetry and ranging signals within the same bandwidth represents a key advancement for modern space missions, particularly Lagrangian science missions and planetary probes. To enhance the technological readiness of such a system, a hardware demonstrator has been developed using the AMD Xilinx (San Jose, CA, USA) ZCU111 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), selected for its high-speed digital signal processing capabilities and integrated converters. The system, in this preliminary breadboarding phase, operates at a fixed telemetry rate of 4.25 Msym/s and a ranging rate of 2.987 Mchip/s, constrained within a 10 MHz bandwidth typical for science missions. Despite these limitations, tests demonstrated that integrating telemetry with Pseudo Noise (PN) Ranging introduces negligible implementation losses compared to telemetry-only transmission. The system also supports high-order modulations up to 64-APSK, improving spectral efficiency within the available bandwidth. Although some limitations have been found in the use of very high-order modulations, this prototype demonstrates the feasibility of integrating advanced coding techniques with PN Ranging.