The OPS-SAT ground segment¶

Groundstations¶

The OPS-SAT ground segment comprises of 4 groundstations in Ireland, Germany and Austria.

• IE-01 (UHF) in Cork, Ireland (provided by LeafSpace)
• ESOC-1 (S-band) in Darmstadt, Germany
• ESOC-2 (UHF) in Darmstadt, Germany (undergoing commissioning)
• TUG-1 (UHF) in Graz, Austria

UHF Coverage¶

The stations in Ireland and Austria provide the FCT with UHF coverage from roughly 40ºW to 40ºE and are mainly used for spacecraft configuration, checks and setting up.
The station in Darmstadt (on the ESOC premises) is the main station for high-rate S-band operations.

While UHF provides excellent coverage the FCT did notice degraded link performance when the spacecraft is over central Europe, and improved performance over the Atlantic and North African regions.
This was confirmed by long-term measurements of the UHF background level.

S-band¶

Main operations are carried out on S-band at a rate of 1Mbps downlink and 256kbps uplink.
The station in use is the ESOC1 S/X-band Antenna part of the SMILE infrastructure at ESOC.

More information about SMILE at: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/Want_to_SMILE
SMILE Technical leaflet: https://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/smile/SMILE_Support_Catalogue_v2.0_final_for_web.pdf