Ground Stations

At Kauai Community College, HSFL operates and maintains a UHF, VHF, and L/S-Band VHF amateur ground station for satellite operations. This ground station is integrated with our in-house developed (and open sourced) COSMOS software to facilitate coordination of equipment and tracking of satellites. Using COSMOS, this system is capable of complete automation of satellite contacts. The ground station is also manually controllable and assisted with Orbitron.

The ground station is fully operational and is being used for training and practice satellite passes. Kauai Community College serves as our primary site for training satellite operators and is our primary operational ground station. In 2014, we deployed our first L/S-band antenna, a 2.4m reflector. The antenna is currently configured for reception of telemetry between 2.0-2.5GHz and can be expanded to work across 1.5-2.5GHz. Infrastructure has been set up to allow for quick modifications to allow for L/S-band uplinks through this antenna. In addition, the new L/S-band telemetry/telecommand system will allow for direct implementation of IP packet exchanges with satellites, as well as allowing for standard clock/data interfaces for legacy/proprietary flexibility.

HSFL was chosen as one of four university sites to host a node of the Mobile CubeSat Command and Control (MC3) project developed by the Naval Postgraduate School. This compact node features transmit and receive capability in both S-Band and UHF, with independent antennas and radios. It has been installed on the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa campus for shared usage between the MC3 network, and HSFL. Its ready availability to HSFL facilitates the development of ground station technologies.