The communication engineers need to evaluate footprint movement to deploy a ground station. Geostationary communication satellite's inclination angle causes the movement of a satellite footprint. The calculation of the inclination angle requires complex astronomical knowledge and mathematical calculations. On the other hand, a satellite communication engineer does not need a very accurate inclination angle value to design a ground station for required service availability. We propose a practical method called trigonometric curve fitting for the inclination to solve the problem. The past and the future value of inclination can be evaluated by using the curve-fitting method. It is a simplified practical method and does not need advanced orbital dynamics knowledge. The orbit geometry and evaluated inclination angle are used for estimation of a coverage area movement. A satellite communication engineer can evaluate coverage area oscillation quickly and design a better link for an inclined orbit satellite by using the proposed method. We have evaluated the inclination angle of the communication satellite Sat-1 with the proposed method. Sat-1 spot beam movements and wide beam coverage area movements are estimated to obtain EIRP and G/T fluctuation for link budget purposes. The proposed method provides the results that are consistent with the results of measurements and the results of satellite operators' professional tools.
Satellite operators utilize a two-stations turn around ranging (TAR) system to reduce the ground station measurement system's complexity and cost while having the same or better orbit determination accuracy for communication satellites orbit determination recently. This study investigates two stations' performance, four-way ranging on communication satellite orbit determination, operational conformance, and cost. The observation data sets are collected using traditional single station tracking (SST) and the new method TAR. The computed results using the Monte Carlo method encourage the satellite operators to use a four-way ranging system to observe and measure required data sets. TAR performance is evaluated, taking SST as a reference. The six classical orbital elements (a, e, i, RAAN, AoP, and TA) are compared for large numbers of observation data. The SST and TAR results are very close to each other. The worst-case calculated Euclidian distance between SST and TAR is 1.893 km at the epoch below the 6 km success criteria. The TAR observation method is appropriate to collect data sets for precise orbit determination. This work result indicates that satellite operators should consider deploying TAR stations to collect two-station range data sets and compute the orbit for nominal north-south station-keeping maneuvers (NSSK) and east-west station-keeping (EWSK) maneuver operations. The TAR method is superior to SST in terms of accuracy, operational conformance, and costs.
The most effective technique used to measure rain attenuation is experimentally monitoring the received signal strength of satellite beacon. A satellite beacon is a signal which does not modulated and sends to the ground in constant frequency with a specifically designed power. Beacon signals are used by ground station antenna users to track the satellite easily. The satellite operators generally choose beacon signal at the Ku Band frequency band since this band is more resistant to rain attenuation. Ku band satellite system performance describe by the contribute of rainfall rate and rain attenuation. This paper includes the comparison of rain attenuation in Ku band beacon and takes as a reference ITU -838 model caused by rain fall rate in TURKSAT premises. It is compared by calculating that how signals affected from rain between 2012 and 2019 observations for a TURKSAT satellite and in this measurement, both theoretical formula and data are used.
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