The Master's thesis addresses the research topic about atmospheric impairments on the millimeter-wave propagation. The design, implementation and validation of a Q-band satellite receiver for observing an Alphasat's Q-band beacon is presented. The receiver consists of a microwave antenna, Low-Noise Block (LNB) and digital detector based on Software Defined Radio (SDR).
First, the design of a Q-band LNB is presented. The LNB is designed as a superheterodyne receiver, built with an off-the-shelf commercial components. In the thesis, an individual modules of the LNB are described, along with appropriate techniques. The simulation results are given and compared with actual measurements.
The digital detector consists of a SDR hardware, where the Analog-to-Digital Conversion and decimation takes place, the digital signal processing runs on personal computer as a software developed in an open-source software framework. The program calculates the Received Signal Strength Information and writes it to a data file.
Developed modules were validated with an appropriative measurements, and afterwards assembled to a fully working satellite station, observing Alphasat's Q-band beacon. Furthermore, the experimental results for a rainy day, of the real set-up are given and discussed.
In the conclusion, an overview of the designed satellite receiver. The actuality of the topic is discussed and the designed receiver performance is compared with other Alphasat stations. Finally, the thesis is concluded with discussion about the future work.
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