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Effective Maintenance + Troubleshooting of Earth Stations, SatMagazine

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Keysight Technologies

Effective Maintenance + Troubleshooting Of Earth Stations

Article Reprint

Effective Maintenance + Troubleshooting Of Earth Stations

If recent forecasts come to pass over the next few years, governments and commercial entities around the world will be placing hundreds of new satellites into orbit—they also will be constructing new ground stations and teleports to manage the satellites and their high-volume data traffic.

Ensuring the smooth operation of this new infrastructure will depend on thefast, efficient and cost-effective maintenance and troubleshooting of crucial Earth station equipment. In the past, testing the various radio frequency (RF) and microwave elements has typically required five or six pieces of test equipment, including a spectrum analyzer, a vector network analyzer (VNA) and a cable and antenna tester (CAT).

Today, Keysight’s handheld combination analyzers can replace the full set of instruments previously used for measurements in the field. The latest models can be configured to deliver precise measurements at millimeterwave frequencies virtually anywhere satellite maintainers need to go.

Outlining The Essential Measurements For Earth

Stations

Effective maintenance and troubleshooting requires testing of the overall system and its key elements: antennas, transmitters, receivers and transmission lines. Example measurements include return loss (antenna), fault location (transmission lines), high-power amplifier performance (transmitter), low-noise amplifier (LNA) performance (receiver), and carrier-tonoise measurements (system-level).

he realm of New Commercial Space is like a foreign land to those who have been approaching launch vehicle development in the conventional manner: using unlimited funding and wildly expensive ‘standard industry practices’. These elements bear astronomically high price-tags from suppliers who simply get on the gravy train, or as a representative of a prime contractor once facetiously related to an IOS founder, “I’ll bet you think we just back our big vacuum cleaner up to NASA and the DoD, hook it up and turn it on and suck all the money out… we’ll, you’d be right!”

The DoD and NASA have been victimized so long by the Primes’ approach that the real cost of what it actually takes to build and qualify a launch system—particularly one built and dedicated to lowering launch costs—has long been lost.

A New Commercial Space company such as Interorbital starts its design phase by learning how to work within the constraints of a limited and sometimes nearly non-existent budget. The component, or engine, or ground support unit has to be cheap or the company cannot afford to build it.

That’s where the heavy thinking starts... Question number one, “How can we do this?” then, more specifically, Question number two, “How can we make a $20 million dollar bi-propellant liquid rocket engine for under $1,500?”

However, Big Aerospace and the agencies who serve it never look back, never think of cost-cutting, and continually feed the fires of doubt and fear by claiming that less money will make a rocket system unsafe. So far, that line has worked well for them to keep launch high-priced and ‘safe.’ This has been to the detriment of those trying to make a price-point breakthrough by developing a dedicated smallsat launcher and delivering the benefits of low-cost space access to all, particularly the not-so-well-heeled groups of cash-strapped students and struggling experimenters who are just entering launch-world.

Through innovative and completely unorthodox analysis, the proponents of the Commercial Space movement look at a billion dollar launcher and think, “What’s wrong with this picture?” Why should this vehicle cost so much?” How can we get to the same place—space, that is—and do it for less?”

Interorbital answered those questions by creating a design, manufacturing, testing, qualification, and launch philosophy based on Aerospace Corporation’s 1960s breakthrough study on Minimum Cost Design; by following instructions given by John London III, in his iconoclastic book.

Equipping Support Personnel

Users can configure Keysight handhelds to perform CAT, VNA, signal analysis, and more. This range of essential, accurate and timesaving capabilities enables faster diagnosis and repair of faults.

For example, calibrated CAT and VNA measurements help field personnel maintain cable, waveguide and antenna systems consistently and efficiently. Focusing on spectrum analysis highlights the advantages of Keysight’s FieldFox microwave analyzers. For more than 20 years, operators around the world have relied on “portable” spectrum analyzers that were, in reality, a “luggable” solution.

For example, the widely used HP 8565E/EC weighed a hefty 17.3 kg, (38 lbs) and measured 34 x 43 x 19 cm (13.3 x 16.8 x 7.4 in). In contrast, a FieldFox handheld analyzer weighs just 3.2 kg. (7.1 lbs) and measures about 29 x 19 x 7 cm (11.5 x 7.4 x 2.8 in).

These units offer exceptional durability, using a mechanical design that includes no fans or vents. For example, FieldFox has a rugged, fully sealed enclosure that’s compliant with US MIL-PRF-28800F Class 2 requirements. The analyzers have also been type tested to IEC/EN 60529 IP53 requirements for protection from dust and water, extending instrument durability in even the harshest environments.

Warm-up time was another inconvenient aspect of the previous-generation luggable analyzers. This is no longer an issue: with an “instant alignment” feature, a FieldFox microwave analyzer is ready to make highly accurate spectrum measurements at power-up and during ongoing changes over a specified temperature range (e.g., –10 to +55 degrees C or 14 to 131 degrees F). This feature also enables the built-in power meter to make accurate measurements without using an external power sensor.

Carrying Precision Into The Field

Compared to traditional analog designs, a modern digital architecture provides important advantages. For example, there are none of the log-fidelity errors that affect amplitude linearity. Gone, too, are the span-accuracy errors that affect frequency accuracy.

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