Development of CINEMA Mission Uplink Communication System

Abstract

Triplet Ionospheric Observatory (TRIO) CubeSatforIon, Neutral, Electron MAgneticfields (CINEMA) is a CubeSat with the weight 3 kg that will be operated in the orbit conditions of about 800 km altitude and 90° inclination angle, using the S-band and ultra-high frequency (UHF)-band communication frequencies. Regarding the communication antenna loaded on the satellite, the two patch antennas has the downlink function in the S-band, whereas the two whip antennas has the function to receive the command sent by the ground station to the satellite in the UHF-band. The uplink ground station that communicates through the UHF-band with the CINEMA satellite was established at Kyung Hee University. The system is mainly composed of a terminal node controller, a transceiver, and a helical antenna. The gain of the helical antenna established at the Kyung Hee University ground station was 9.8 dBi. The output of the transceiver was set to be 5 W (6.9 dB) for the communication test. Through the far-field test of the established system, it was verified that the Roman characters, figures and symbols were converted into packets and transmitted to the satellite receiver in the communication speed of 9,600 bps.

Keywords

• CubeSat
• ground station
• satellite
• satellite communication