Frequency and waveform agile receiver covering the ultra high frequency band

Southwest Research Institute^® (SwRI^®) has developed a radio frequency (RF) receiver that is agile in frequency and waveform over the ultra high frequency (UHF) band. The software defined receiver is CubeSat-scale in size and power consumption, and it provides a flexible, adaptable solution for a number of RF application areas including communications, tracking and locating, and signals intelligence. Based on SwRI internal funding and previous developments for the U.S. Government, the receiver, which is currently at a technology readiness level of five, enables pre-mission and on-orbit reconfiguration plus RF agility from 300 to 3,000 MHz with a bandwidth of up to 30 MHz. This paper describes the hardware architecture of the agile receiver and provides an application example of the geographical location of a terrestrial RF transmitter. In this example, geolocation performance is simulated using performance parameters of the receiver modeled on two or three low Earth orbit spacecraft to estimate the location of the transmitter. A number of spatial separations of the three spacecraft configuration are considered. Further, two RF frequencies are simulated, one for an RF transmitter in the lower portion of the UHF band and another for an RF transmitter in a higher portion of the UHF band. Results show that this small, low power technology, which is suitable for a CubeSat payload, provides a capability for geolocating terrestrial transmitters.