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This project is dedicated to the Satellite Communications Club of George Mason University. The purpose of this project is to create an alternative to conventional SDR programs on Linux for receiving data (i.e. GQRX, SDRAngel), so that users can have more options for creating their own UI when creating novel signal processing techniques.

The amateur radio community has been constantly trying to find a better way to communicate with satellites for decades. AMSAT, an American organization dedicated to supporting amateur radio communications, alternatively known as “Ham radio”. The involvement of George Mason University (GMU) with the AMSAT community has continually grown over time. This includes the recent development of the GMU SATCOM team and an increasing number of courses offered to graduate students on satellite communications and design. The continued increase in demand for satellite-related technologies has caused the university to grow its curriculum to cater to the demand. As a result, there is an ongoing demand for technology to be developed for George Mason University to receive data from satellites to allow students to understand satellite communications in greater depth.

There was preexisting infrastructure inside the VSE building that consisted of coaxial lines connected to an antenna mast on the roof. Additionally, there was technology located inside the Communications and Networking Laboratory (CNL) to interface with the mast. However, there was no dedicated radio setup for such a system. Normally a setup for satellite communications could be inexpensive, however, there would be poor performance and it would not be able to endure extreme weather conditions. A good setup requires a significant financial investment to not only be resistant to harsh weather conditions but also maximize received signal strength to receive data from a variety of satellites. A few years before this project, Jonathan Mitchell wrote his Master’s Thesis on using antennae of separate, direction polarizations to improve performance by minimizing bit error rate (BER). Mitchell came up with a variety of algorithms that could be used to optimize performance and the faculty of GMU was very curious to see if this is physically implemented. Our advisor proposed that it could be used to develop a high-performance ground station at a marginally lower cost than other stations.