Design of COTS-Based Radio-Frequency Receiver for Cubesat Applications

Nowadays, integrated small size low sensitivity Radio-Frequency (RF) receivers are quite common on the market. However, they are typically designed for terrestrial communication standards. Integrated circuits that have similar performance are not usually conceived for telemetry & telecommand (TMTC) satellite applications. Moreover, they are not enough hardy to radiations and strong temperature changes that typically occur in the space. In order to deal with such issues, we present a design methodology for RF systems based on different techniques, such as the use of the Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components, the system-based modeling and the electromagnetic analysis of the 50 Ω impedance lines. This methodology has been exploited in order to design a satellite receiver that has a very low noise figure (1 dB), which has improved widely its sensitivity (-115 dBm). A 52 dB Adjustable Gain Control (AGC) range has been obtained by cascading two COTS amplifiers with an intrinsic AGC. The receiver has been made compliant to TMTC applications by designing the input filter to have 2025-2110 MHz bandwidth. Moreover, the receiver has been made radiation tolerant up to 20 krad. The excellent performance reported in this paper makes the receiver suitable for the CubeSat satellites.