LEO Meteorological Satellite Ground Station
The goal of this work was to develop a user ground station with a satellite tracking dish antenna to receive meteorological data from satellites developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and operated by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) - Metop-B and Metop-C.
Hardware Architecture
The ground segment features a 1.9m diameter parabolic dish equipped with a custom Left-Hand Circularly Polarized (LHCP) patch antenna. Accurate tracking is ensured by a heavy-duty SPID rotor paired with an MD-02 controller, achieving high-precision dual-axis movement.
Receiver Stack
Operating in the L-band (1701.3 MHz), the RF signal is conditioned by a Nooelec Low-Noise Amplifier and SAW filter. The core receiver is a Hydra SDR connected via USB to a Raspberry Pi 5. The entire stack is housed in a custom 3D-printed, waterproof ASA enclosure and powered seamlessly via PoE.
Software Pipeline
Our architecture translates Gpredict's orbital calculations into real-time mechanical tracking via Hamlib. For signal processing, SDR++ handles raw baseband data with drop-free DSP, which is then fed into SatDump for an end-to-end, automated high-resolution imagery decoding pipeline.
Project Poster
