Satellite ground station using quadrifilar helix antenna

Abstract

The lack of cost-effective working ground station in Nepal has led to the development of a QFH antenna for satellite communication. The project focuses on designing an efficient, easy to build and budget friendly ground station used for receiving the APT signals from the NOAA satellite. The QFH antenna is a widely used circularly polarized antenna in weather satellite communication. Due to its Omni - directional pattern, this ground station does not need tracking mechanism, which is complex and expensive to design. There was not significant improvement in the signals received from the other directional antennas which required complex tracking system and the circularly polarized QFH antenna which led us to choose the simple QFH antenna. This ground station uses the other components like LNA to reduce the noise levels during the long-distance communication and uses spectrum analyzer and Nano VNA to observe the required parameters for the efficient signal reception. Similarly, it uses SDRSharp for recording the signal received from the satellite which is then resampled at rate of 11025Hz and exported in a wav file format and uses NOAA APT decoder and WXtoIMG to decode the following signal to generate weather images, demonstrating the capability to establish reliable communication with NOAA satellites. Hence, this includes signal reception, noise reduction, and image decoding. The ground station has several practical uses, including real-time weather monitoring, disaster management support, and educational purposes. It provides an accessible platform for understanding satellite communication.