A software defined radio based satellite TTC-RF system simulator

This paper presents the design of a TTC-RF (Telemetry, Tracking and Command-RF) system simulator. The simulator is designed on PXI Platform using Labview software with the software defined radio approach. The PXI RF modules used for this purpose is Vector Signal Generator (VSG) and Vector Signal Analyzer (VSA). The simulator is designed to simulate all the RF functionalities of an actual TTC transponder which will be required during the Test & Evaluation (T&E) of the ground testing system prior to the actual satellite testing. We shows in this paper that a TTC-RF simulator can be designed with PXI based RF modules and Labview software using Software Defined Radio approach. We further presents in paper the highly configurable nature of the simulator, its architecture, design & development, various features along with the test results.