IMPLEMENTATION AND PERFORMANCE OF GROUND-BASED BEAM FORMING IN THE ICO G1 MOBILE SATELLITE SYSTEM
- Paper number
IAC-08.B2.1.7
- Author
Mr. John L. Walker, Space Systems Loral, United States
- Year
2008
- Abstract
The ICO G1 satellite provides Mobile Satellite System (MSS) services and is scheduled for launch April, 2008. The ICO G1 satellite system was architected and developed by Space Systems/Loral and will be the first satellite system to employ Ground Based Beam Forming (GBBF) technology in the forward direction. This paper will describe the development and deployment of this new technology in commercial satellite applications, lowering the demand on satellite resources and lowering satellite development risk. The overall GBBF architecture, its benefits, and its limitations will be discussed. Key to successfully forming and maintaining hundreds of beams, the GBBF system performs continual calibration to correct for forward uplink power control, Doppler, return feed path gain and phase imbalance, pointing error, and forward feed path gain and phase imbalance and multi-port amplifier cross-coupling. The design and verification of this vital calibration function will be presented. In addition, the challenges encountered during the development and current status and performance of the system will be discussed.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
(absent)