Towards Miniature Ground Stations for Low Earth Orbit Satellites

Satellites have been in orbit around the earth for a long time and their numbers have been increasing at an exponential pace recently. However, ground stations, which are a critical component of any satellite mission, have continued to remain bulky, expensive and often require specialized machinery and installation infrastructure with the exception of receivers meant for heavily coded satellite signals like GPS. Such a complicated infrastructure is needed to overcome the huge signal attenuation experienced by satellite signals coming from 1000s of kilometers away. This has proven to be a barrier for enthusiasts and researchers who might be interested in accessing satellite data without incurring the high costs as well as enabling low latency satellite data access in remote and underserved regions of the earth prone to rapidly evolving disaster scenarios like forest fires and floods.

In this dissertation, we propose gradually simplifying approaches to receive satellite signals using tiny low-cost ground stations that can be deployed anywhere. First, using multiple such tiny ground stations in Quasar, we demonstrate how we can leverage receiver diversity to boost received signal power. Next, we simplify this system further in SelfieStick, by using a single tiny receiver using receptions from multiple satellites through a transmitter diversity approach to recover earth images from satellites. Third, we describe Illume which removes the dependence on diverse transmitter and receiver sources, and proposes a novel analytical and data driven approach to extract useful inference information from noisy satellite images received from a single tiny ground station. We also show how these techniques can enable communication and Earth observation applications, particularly useful in remote and underserved regions of the earth as well as pave the way for building a cheap and scalable global satellite ground station network. Finally, we also touch upon the other aspect of satellite communication network, i.e, the ground station terminal to end user device link and describe how mmFD improves bandwidth efficiency by enabling a Full Duplex link at mmWave frequencies.