Utilization of a Portable Ground Station to Conduct Site Surveys in the S-Band Frequency for CubeSat at MSU’s Mission

CubeSat at MSU is an undergraduate student-led design team working to construct, launch, and operate Mississippi’s first satellite. The 1-Mississippi mission is focused on wildfire detection through hyperspectral imaging and thus requires a ground station that will accommodate a large bandwidth at a high frequency. An efficient ground station operating in the s-band frequency (2.1 GHz) is vital to downloading the large image files for a successful mission. A simplified and portable ground station was constructed to conduct site surveys on and around the Mississippi State University campus to test the feasibility of a permanent location, the Line of sight (LOS0), possible radio interferences, and the noise floor. The system consists of a 1.76 GHz 6.5 turns Helicone antenna, 2.4 GHz Grid antenna, Yaezu 5500 Elevation-Azimuth Dual Controller, counterbalanced boom, 4ft mast, linux based base station, G-Predict antenna and satellite tracking software, SDR++ SDR software, CaribouLite dual channel 6GHz sub 1GHz transceiver, and custom Arduino based RS232 controller to interface to the G5500. This paper details the design and construction of the test ground station within the constraints of the mission, the site survey test procedure, and the results of the experimentation.