A satellite ground station for teaching digital and wireless communications

With the advent of small satellites and affordable communications hardware, there has been an increase in academic interest in space education. Small satellites are often created with an educational purpose, and they transmit strong signals that are easy to detect. They pass over large areas of the planet a few times a day, providing increased opportunities for successful communication. On the hardware side, software-defined radio receivers can be connected to an amplifier and an antenna to create a ground station at surprisingly low cost. In this paper, our aim is to use satellite communications as a laboratory activity in already-existing courses on digital and wireless communications. These activities would supplement, rather than replace, established laboratory assignments. We believe that this has two main benefits. One is motivational: we believe students will be excited to receive and decode signals from space. The other is that, precisely since the signals come from actual devices, decoding the data will present a meaningful cognitive challenge.