Portable Doppler Tracking Ground Station

Master thesis (2023)

Authors

Amber Sprenkels Aerospace Engineering

Contributors

B.C. Root Astrodynamics & Space Missions - Aerospace Engineering (supervisor 1)
Faculty
Aerospace Engineering
Copyright: © 2023 Amber Sprenkels
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Published Date

26-10-2023

Language

English

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Faculty

Aerospace Engineering

Abstract

This thesis analyses the possibility of creating a portable Doppler tracking ground station using commercial of the shelf components. This solution is called DopTrackBox and is based on TU Delft’s DopTrack. This system uses the Doppler shift of radio signals received from satellites to analyse their location and velocity. Different experiments were conducted to analyse the effects of various hardware components on the system. From the experiments can be concluded that the most impactful hardware change is switching from an omnidirectional antenna to a manually pointed directional one, as this introduces more variance to the system. When using the same omnidirectional antennas as DopTrack, DopTrackBox performs on par with the bigger system; achieving a higher SNR and lower range rate differences. More research is needed to look into the specific effects of the GPS clock and different SDR.