Austrian satellite ground station for the Alphasat Q/V band experiments

The bandwidth demand in radio communications is increasing every year, not only in the terrestrial domain, but also in the satellite domain. The Ku Band is already at its capacity limit and the higher Ka Band is filling rapidly and will reach its capacity limit in the years to come. From both the research and commercial point of view it is important to explore the next frontier for satellite communication, which is the Q/V band. In radio communication it is not only a simple up-scaling of the frequency to achieve the same gain with smaller antennas as with bigger antennas in lower bands, but it is the challenge to handle the different wave propagation properties of these higher bands. In Q/V band the atmospheric attenuations are changing quicker than in lower bands (up to 3 dB/s) and the scintillation caused by gas density changes are in the region of 1 Hz with amplitudes of up to 2 dB.

The newly developed ground station in Graz will now help to answer basic research questions in the exploration of the Q/V band. The questions are for instance: Which fade mitigation technique is the best to operate a modem via the Q/V band channel or which averaging times shall be used to have the highest availability with the lowest required margins. Joanneum Research will investigate the optimal operation of this channel together with researchers from the University of Rome Tor Vergata and in the wave propagation domain together with the Politecnico di Milano.