Ground station design procedures for CANSAT

CANSAT´s are getting more popular each day in aerospace engineering curriculums because they enable the students to have hands-on experience on virtual satellite launch operations. This paper presents design and implementation of a PC based ground station for CANSAT´s. So far, most of the emphasis has been built on the hardware and software inside the CANSAT. However, during the competitions it has been observed that even though the CANSAT works perfectly, the ground station frequently fails therefore leading to mission failure. In this study a ground station is developed from scratch using a high level language (C#) and the procedure is defined briefly. The station is platform-free therefore it may operate with any CANSAT having different brand microcontrollers. The users may track several parameters and send control commands simultaneously. The ground-station is one of the most important aspects of CANSAT trials however, for the beginners it may be challenging to provide all these features at once. This study defines many practical aspects of designing ground stations so that more emphasis may be given to the design of CANSAT hardware and software.