FPGA-Based Instrument for Satellite Beacon Monitoring on Propagation Experiments

This paper presents the design of an instrument for satellite beacon monitoring based on field programmable gate array (FPGA). The aim of this paper is to receive a beacon transmitted by a satellite in the Ka-band (18–21 GHz), process this signal, and obtain results for propagation studies (attenuation, fading, scintillation, etc.). The analog front-end performs the frequency down-conversion from the Ka-band RF beacon frequency to an intermediate frequency (IF) of 10.7 MHz. This IF signal is processed with the developed FPGA-based beacon detector to obtain the amplitude fluctuations of the received signal. The amplitude data is stored and later processed in a computer to obtain the experimental results (scintillation and rain attenuation measurements). This paper describes in detail the satellite beacon monitoring instrument structure, analyzes the receiver characteristics, and presents some operational test results.