Satellite Communication System Design

The satellite communications field offers exciting technical and business opportunities. This practical, applications-oriented course provides a rigorous background in satellite communications principles and theory, and discusses current, future, and pioneering communication satellites, including L-band, C-band, Ku-band, and Ka-band systems. This course explores the use of satellites for TV, telephone, data transmission, and Internet access. Topics include antenna farms and trade-offs of phased array versus MBA and other approaches, link calculations, IMs, PIMs, modulation techniques, earth terminal design, packet switching networks for satellites, and on-board processing versus transponder designs. Instruc-tion covers communication hardware design/testing for low-noise amplifiers, mixers, filters, multiplex-ers, DSP equipment, frequency synthesizers, solid-state amplifiers, tubes, etc. The course also covers such concepts as EIRP, G/T, and noise figure, and describes tradeoffs of satellite versus fiber-optic and other communication links. Instruction examines the marketplace and ITU/FCC regula-tions. The instructor in this course demonstrates the use of Matlab and other software tools for analysis, simulation, and problem solving. These tools are provided as part of the course fee as an option for student use and will not be part of the course grading criteria .