Satellite Communications

ECTI developed a 4-day course on Satellite Communications. The purpose of this course is to enable the students to develop a systems view of satellite communications (SATCOM), along with a firm understanding of satellite system architecture design and performance analysis. The focus is communications satellites, but much of the content is applicable to satellites having other primary missions as well. 

Upon completion of this course, you will

• Develop an intuition regarding the trades between SATCOM system design and achievable performance and recent trends in SATCOM system design

• Be able to answer questions such as “What is the achievable data rate for a given satellite system design and what would it take to improve its performance?” or “What are the drivers in designing a satellite system?” or “How do different orbits impact performance?”

• Feel comfortable discussing technical SATCOM concepts with your customers and colleagues

The student will perform calculations to understand digital communications system concepts such as modulation, coding, interleaving, the RF system, and the propagation channel.  These concepts will then be combined to understand and perform a link budget analysis where you will be able to quantify the achievable data rate on a SATCOM link, and identify what modifications would be available to improve performance.  Finally, several selected topics will be discussed including orbits, multi-access techniques, spread spectrum, and jamming concepts.