Potential Of VIRAC* RT-32 And RT-16 Antennas To Serve As Satellite Ground Station

The basic application of RT-32 and RT-16 parabolic antennas is radio astronomy observations, both the radio-telescopes have been upgraded with state-of-the art cryogenic receivers, and now a large-scale modernization of the infrastructure is underway. Since the radio-astronomical observations are not full-time activities, a research work has been done to clear up whether these antennas, besides the mentioned activities, can be used as a satellite ground station. The main goal of this added functionality is to make possible the use of the extremely high reception systems’ figure-of-merit thus raising the satellite downlink data rates without increasing the on-board power consumption, which would be particularly important for developers of small satellites. In this paper, the progress in the research project is reported, which includes successful S-band satellite signal reception experiments and possible options as to integration of the related equipment into the system so that both functionalities could successfully coexist. Performance of the existing and the upgraded antenna positioning systems is estimated to determine if the latter are usable even for servicing low-Earth orbiting satellites. In addition, possible options are considered as to upgrading the system with automatic beam tracking capability, which would increase the antenna pointing accuracy even further.