The CubeSat satellite ground station at the University of Würzburg is built with “commercial of the shelf” low cost amateur radio hardware. It opens up opportunities for Students to receive weather satellites and operate CubeSats, including Würzburg's UWE-I.
As any other satellite ground station, it is built up on essential hardware, as there are Antenna, Radio, Modem.
Furthermore a software is used to afford basic control over the ground station and provide tracking abilities to follow a satellite passing the ground station on the horizon.

The basic ground station is composed of 3 main components, an Antenna, a Radio and a Modem. Each of these devices fulfills essential operations.

• Antenna
  the antenna is needed to establish a connection with a chosen satellite. It is mounted upon a rotor, wich provides the possibility to move the antenna to any position by editing its azimuth- and elevation angle.
• Radio
  the Radio makes it possible to set transmit- and receive-frequencies, used to connect the chosen satellite. It also can be changed in many other settings, necessary to establish a radio-connection.
• Modem
  the Modem is used to exchange data with a connected satellite. It transforms digital data, sent by the source into a radio-signal, which can be transmitted to the satellite.

For manual control and automatic tracking purposes, Würzburg's satellite ground station was chosen to be endowed with a ground station control software.
Between all alternatives, we picked the Mercury GS system. Mercury is an open source ground station control software, developed by stanford university using the GSML standard to control any ground station hardware.
In addition, mercury makes use of another open source tool, called Predict. This one is needed to get necessary data for auto-tracking satellites.

For further informations about Mercury & Predict, visit the MercuryGS website.

For further informations about our experiences, setting up a GroundStation with MercuryGS and Predict, have a look at this Documentation.

If our documentation could not answer all of your questions, just contact us.

The latest work, cognate with the Würzburg cubesat project has just started and will prospectively be finished in April 2005. Main target of this task will be, to create a distributed, component-based system, to connect satellite ground control stations all over the globe.
Therefore a client-server system will be developed within the scope of a Diploma Thesis, already containing an interface to interact with the MercuryGS ground station software.

Description of Conclusions...