ILS

Objectives

For many satellite operator interference represents a serious problem for network operations. Several hundreds of events are recorded per year and this number is likely to grow with the increase in traffic and the number of unattended stations.

Therefore, the proposed system will be designed to support the satellite communications market in terms of rapidly detecting an interferer and geo-locating the offending emitter’s position on the earth together with other useful information about the interferer, such as indications on the antenna size (by comparing the signal level on the interfered satellite and the adjacent satellite).

In order to make optimum use of the ILS, the geographical position information will be complemented with careful exploitation of the SIECAMS earth station and carrier database. The system will integrate the SIECAMS interference detection technology with state-of-the-art geo-location techniques on a common signal acquisition and processing platform.

The result will be a seamless, all-in-one interference location solution with dramatic improvement in system affordability and capability. Because ILS is based on common signal acquisition equipment, it can also be used for spectrum monitoring and interference detection purpose. Therefore, the planned enhancement of Siecams will fully support spectrum monitoring, interference detection and sophisticated geo-location functions in a single system.

Currently available transmitter location systems are limited in detection performance with weak signals and/or signals suffering non-linear distortion from transponder saturation. For this purpose, the proposed development will provide significant improvements by supporting dedicated demodulation techniques and signal post linearization concepts based upon these techniques.

In addition, the proposed project shall deal with the requirements for locating the source of frequency agile interferences

Challenges

Development and integration of a tracking system into SIECAMS Automatic. User initiated determination of satellite ephemeris data. Development and integration of an interference location system into SIECAMS Manual and ‘one-button-transfer-mode’ determination of the localization of:

• Digital carriers


• Hidden carrier interference


• Frequency agile traffic

Plan

For each phase of the development process a review is defined in order to verify the results of the phase concerning technical aspects, quality assurance aspects and project control aspects.

Following is an overview of the review meetings and review dates as actually planned for this project:

Current Status

Achievements:

• Tracking system finalized,
• Baseline version of ILS finished.

Planned next tasks:

• Automatic reference carrier selection,
• Signal linearization.