LEO CubeSat/Smallsat
The LEO CubeSat/smallsat market is growing at a high rate. The CubeSat community, which used to be predominately research based, is now split 50-50 between research and pioneering businesses that are offering an ever-increasing range of professional business services based on the data being transmitted from LEO satellites. The technical challenges faced by these companies are two-fold: data rates (and quality of service) back to the ground need to increase significantly to cope with the massive quantity of data being generated by high-resolution on-board sensors; minimising time-to-market means that it is imperative to use a professional off-the-shelf end-to-end comms solution rather than reinvent the wheel by creating proprietary smallsat comms processing systems.
Paradise, in conjunction with several CubeSat partner companies, now provides a complete end-to-end communications system – from the onboard CubeSat comms system to the ground-based demodulator and computer data capture/processing support. Specific support available from Paradise and our partners includes:
- CCSDS telemetry standard compliance, supporting CubeSat satellite link communications at up to 60Mbps. Features include forward error correction, interleaving and scrambling using a variety of standardised CCSDS FEC schemes.
- Software-defined demodulators that can easily be reprogrammed to meet future needs.
- A wide range of underlying packet protocols are supported including CCSDS, CubeSat Space Protocol, AX.25, as well as various more ad-hoc data formats that are widely used such as JPEG, MPEG, etc.
- Extended Doppler handling to cope with the high speed of LEO satellites during satellites passes.
- Choice of serial or IP output from the demodulator.
- Optional RTP timestamps and link performance metadata for IP packets output from the demodulator.
- Unicast and multicast computer IP packet capture software to facilitate ground-based data processing and storage. This includes interoperability with various free data capture applications.
- In addition to supporting the standard carrier roll-off factors, we support larger than normal roll-off factors to allow users to minimise the peak-to-average-power-ratio of the generated waveform. This minimises distortion of the transmitted signal and thereby relaxes the design constraints for the smallsat transmission system, which are typically subject to extreme size, weight and power limitations.
A datasheet for our QubeFlex™ transceiver/modem for CubeSat/SmallSat/LEO can be found here.
Please contact us to discuss our growing support for satellite communications products for the LEO CubeSat/smallsat market.
