Satellite Beacon Receiver Improvement Using Digital Signal Processing

Typical satellite receivers for monitoring the low power beacons on communication satellites in order to gather statistics on the effects of rain on satellite communication have analogue circuits in the down conversion and frequency control process that are costly to align. The Authors have designed such a satellite receiver which uses a complex down conversion and frequency control system in order to frequency shift the 12.75 GHz beacon signal to the centre of the 100 Hz bandwidth final intermediate frequency (IF) filter centred at 3 kHz [l]. This paper describes a digital down conversion system which simplifies the frequency control and thus allows a significant reduction in hardware complexity and manufacturing cost.