Portable Doppler Tracking Ground Station
Amber Sprenkels (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
B. C. Root – Mentor (TU Delft - Astrodynamics & Space Missions)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
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.