A Nanosatellite Receiver Downconverter C-Band to L-Band Bandpass Filters—Review and Design

Nanosatellites and particularly CubeSats, are becoming the preferred satellites type when considering satellite systems design for education, research, small-scale and low-cost commercial deployments. To ensure data is timeously sent and received during a CubeSat overpass with its ground station, higher data rate is required. As a result, this paper presents a spaceborne C-band to L-band receiver downconverter bandpass filters (BPFs) review, design and implementation. The paper contributions include a succinct literature review of spaceborne receiver's downconverter, as well as BPFs and finally the design and constructions of BPFs in a 5.66 to 1.265 GHz receiver downconverter. The i) radio frequency (RF) BPF and the ii) intermediate frequency (IF) surface acoustic wave (SAW) BPF, respectively have the following simulated | measured performance parameters: a) carrier frequency (FC), b) input return loss (IRL) and c) insertion loss (IL): i) RF BPF a) FC of 5.66 GHz | 5.66 GHz, b) IRL of 16.250 dB | 20.341 dB, c) IL of 1.735 dB | 1.5295 dB and ii) IF BPF a) FC of 1.265 GHz | 1.266 GHz, b) IRL of 24.778 dB | 25.878 dB, c) IL of 1.276 dB | 1.271 dB.