CubeSatCom

The goal of this project is to design the baseband digital electronics for a high-speed, bidirectional communication system targeted towards CubeSats. A CubeSat being a miniaturized satellite in the shape of a cube with a side of 10 cm in length, the power available for the electronics is limited. Nevertheless, the target data rate has been set to a 1 million samples per second. With this, the digital system was built inside a configurable digital circuit of FPGA kind and the system design has put together high performance and small size digital blocks.

The channel coding part is compatible with standards defined by the European Space Agency (ESA). It comprises Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem (BCH) decoding of the telecommands and Reed-Solomon encoding for the telemetry data. The modulation and the demodulation both make use of Quadrature Phase-Shift Keying (QPSK) and they too are compatible with ESA standards.