Development of a Nanosatellite Software Defined Radio Communications System

Communications systems designed with application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology suffer from one very significant disadvantage - the integrated circuits do not possess the ability of programmability. However, Software Defined Radio’s (SDR’s) integrated with Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) provide an opportunity to update the communication system on nanosatellites (which are physically difficult to access) due to their capability of performing signal processing in software. SDR signal processing is performed in software on reprogrammable elements such as FPGA’s. Applying this technique to nanosatellite communications systems will optimize the operations of the hardware, and increase the flexibility of the system. In this research a transceiver algorithm for a nanosatellite software defined radio communications is designed. The developed design is capable of modulation of data to transmit information and demodulation of data to receive information. The transceiver algorithm also works at different baud rates. The design implementation was successfully tested with FPGA-based hardware to demonstrate feasibility of the transceiver design with a hardware platform suitable for SDR implementation.