2.3 Electrical Ground Support Equipment (EGSE)

2.3.3 Introduction

The Electrical Ground Support Equipment - EGSE is designed specifically to track, transmit telecommands and receive telemetry and beacon signals from CubeSats to analysis, as shown in Figure 2.1. Hence, the EGSE is of great importance for FloripaSat mission success as the first and final piece in the communication link, serving as the access point on Earth. The general ground station is composed of hardware and software. The components include a transmit and receive antenna, a transceiver to modulate and demodulate data, and a personal computer with orbital-prediction software compatible with the hardware for autotracking, encode e decode data.

Conventional ground stations are stationary and therefore can only be used in a single location. This makes the station has in short time measure, from 6 to 10 minutes. Therefore the inclusion of the ground station in ground station networks is desired to tracking the FloripaSat all day or at least many hours per day.