Software-Defined Radio Based Station for Projectile Tracking and Telemetry Reception Enhancement

Past decades technological breakthroughs have made software-defined radio (SDR) a viable alternative to analog architectures for many applications. However, projectile tracking is traditionally performed using dedicated architectures, not taking advantage of SDR reconfigurability. This article aims at developing a projectile tracking ground station using low cost commercial SDR. The principles, technical constraints, and experimental setup are detailed, and measurement results are presented for projectiles fired at Mach 0.8.