A community-driven approach to democratize access to satellite ground stations

Abstract

Should you decide to launch a nano-satellite today in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), the cost of renting ground station communication infrastructure is likely to significantly exceed your launch costs. While space launch costs have lowered significantly with innovative launch vehicles, private players, and smaller payloads, access to ground infrastructure remains a luxury. This is especially true for smaller LEO satellites that are only visible at any location for a few tens of minutes a day and whose signals are extremely weak, necessitating bulky and expensive ground station infrastructure. In this paper, we present a community-driven distributed reception paradigm for LEO satellite signals where signals received on many tiny handheld receivers (not necessarily deployed on rooftops but also indoors) are coherently combined to recover the desired signal. This is made possible by employing new synchronization and receiver orientation techniques that study satellite trajectories and leverage the presence of other ambient signals. We compare our results with a large commercial receiver deployed on a rooftop and show a 8 dB SNR increase both indoors and outdoors using 8 receivers, costing $38 per RF frontend.