​LEO CubeSat/Smallsat

The LEO CubeSat/smallsat market is growing at a high rate. The CubeSat community, which used to be predominately research based, is now split 50-50 between research and pioneering businesses that are offering an ever-increasing range of professional business services based on the data being transmitted from LEO satellites. The technical challenges faced by these companies are two-fold: data rates (and quality of service) back to the ground need to increase significantly to cope with the massive quantity of data being generated by high-resolution on-board sensors; minimising time-to-market means that it is imperative to use a professional off-the-shelf end-to-end comms solution rather than reinvent the wheel by creating proprietary smallsat comms processing systems.

Paradise, have supported several CubeSat manufacturers with the Qubeflex CCSDS satellite modem. This unique and flexible product comes with a suite of functionality aimed specifically at the smallsat market:

• CCSDS telemetry standard compliance, supporting CubeSat satellite link communications at up to 50Mbps. Features include forward error correction, interleaving and scrambling using a variety of standardised CCSDS FEC schemes.
• Software-defined demodulators that can easily be reprogrammed to meet future needs.
• Extended Doppler handling to cope with the high speed of LEO satellites during orbit passes.
• Choice of serial or IP output from the demodulator.
• Link performance metadata for IP packets output from the demodulator.
• Built in spectrum and constellation monitoring tools
• In addition to supporting the standard carrier roll-off factors, we support larger than normal roll-off factors to allow users to minimise the peak-to-average-power-ratio of the generated waveform. This minimises distortion of the transmitted signal and thereby relaxes the design constraints for the smallsat transmission system, which are typically subject to extreme size, weight and power limitations.

A datasheet for our QubeFlex™ transceiver/modem for CubeSat/SmallSat/LEO can be found here.

Please contact us to discuss our growing support for satellite communications products for the LEO CubeSat/smallsat market.