System overview of the Virginia Tech Ground Station

Abstract

The Virginia Tech Ground Station (VTGS) is a collaborative, multi-disciplinary effort to construct a new satellite ground station at Virginia Tech that is supported through the university's College of Engineering and is capable of supporting many research, education, and amateur satellite missions. The design for the ground station is heavily software based which provides a flexible platform allowing for future expansion. Each subsystem has a dedicated software radio font-end that can be paired to a quad-core server through a high-throughput network switch; the switch provides failover support allowing any radio server to access any subsystem. Transmit and receive capability is primarily implemented using the GNU Radio software radio framework, while the overall command and control functionality is implemented using a custom framework based on the actor model. The command and control software provides system automation, user management, scheduling and pass determination, hardware control, logging, and data management for the ground station. Both downloaded satellite telemetry and sample captures of the signal are stored on a networked storage device capable of handling data for several thousand satellite passes. A web portal provides access for customers to download mission data and also upload control commands. Future plans include support for a cloud-computing platform that will provide additional redundancy and load balancing for the network, as well as providing a custom ‘Ground Station as a Service’ (GSaS) framework which allows customers to utilize the cloud infrastructure for processing mission data.