Ground stations network – a viable solution

Abstract

Each satellite needs at least one possibility of communication with Earth to deliver the data obtained in space. So, at least one ground station is necessary per satellite. Further ground stations extend the communication duration with a satellite if placed at the correct locations on Earth. The idle times of a ground station between passes and the costs for multiple ground stations per mission can be decreased if several ground stations can be shared between several satellite missions. This idea leads to ground station networks. Otherwise, if several ground stations are available in different locations in a ground station network, the data received from several of them can be combined to increase the signal quality and to yield less outage