Ground Station Setup

There are three ground stations for INSPIRESat-1 and a whole community of Amateur operators (SatNOGs) who provided the vital data for the satellite.

1. IIST, India - UHF & S-Band

2. NTU, Taiwan -  UHF & S-Band

3. LASP, CU Boulder, USA - UHF

I cannot stress enough for the support provided by SatNOGS, you guys are the best! Link to monitor the satellite live, and the Network that helped us!

I was involved in developing and testing the IIST's ground station in various capacities such as procurement, integration, validation and configuring it for multiple missions.

The following Missions were supported through IIST's Ground Station

1. INSPIRESat-1

2. POEM Platform - PSLV C53

3. LEAP-TD - Dhruva Space Mission

Launch Vehicle Integration

Interfacing electrical and mechanical segments of INSPIRESat-1 was handled at Small Spacecraft Systems and Payload Centre (SSPACE), and I had the opportunity to co-lead it on the avionics segment. Below are some of the snippets.

Satellite Commissioning

I worked on software segments of Hydra, and GNU Radio.

1. Commissioning Scripting in Hydra

2. GNU Radio for packet demodulation routing, storage, and operations required for switching Tx/Rx modes at the ground stations end and pushing the packet to transmit mode

Once the satellite was in space, we had to develop further command scripts to operate the satellite towards the following.

1. Subsystem operations verification

2. Communication system setup

3. Data Dumping

4. Payload Operations and Ephemeris updates

Portable Ground Station Setup

A UHF portable ground station compatible with ADALM-PLUTO, NESDR, and RTLSDR.The project aimed at testing Small-satellite command, telemetry, and data downlink. The test bench also supports USRP modules and is used for localized testing of, transceiver boards operational in VHF, UHF, and S-band. 

Done at Small-Spacecraft Systems And Payload Center (SSPACE)