Dual-Antenna Dual-Band High Performance Cubesat-Compatible GPS Receiver

Abstract

Nanosatellites are revolutionizing the space industry allowing low-cost educational, scientific or commercial space missions. Among them, the CubeSats play a key role due to their standardization and increasingly use. As the CubeSat missions become more and more complex and challenging, so do their subsystems. In particular, the position, velocity and attitude of the satellite are commonly required to perform orbital tracking, precise pointing towards some sector of the Earth and other relevant tasks. These requirements can be fulfilled using an appropriate GPS receiver.

This work presents the design and development of a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver (including hardware, software, and programmable logic) oriented to CubeSats along with some experimental results obtained with the first integrated prototype. The receiver can process the L1 and L2 GPS civil signals providing, in addition to the Position Velocity and Time (PVT) solution, high-precision pseudorange and carrier-phase measurements. It also has two antenna inputs that allow obtaining a partial attitude estimation or using the receiver as a GPS-based remote sensing sensor. The experimental results obtained from absolute and differential positioning, and partial attitude estimation show the correct working of the receiver and the excellent quality of the generated measurements.