| Software-defined radio (SDR) gives us a very flexible radio system, which can support multiple standards, multiple frequency bands, and which are reprogrammable and reconfigurable. We can have a convenient and inexpensive implementation of this SDR using a personal computer (PC) as the platform. These features of PC-based SDR exactly fit the specifications for small-satellite communications systems.; We have developed our PC-based SDR keeping in view the needs of a small-satellite communication system. The architecture of our PC-based SDR primarily consists of a PC and a data acquisition (DAQ) board. Processing of the signals is done using software written in MATLAB and C and this gives us more flexibility. Real-time processing of data is done with a sampling rate up to 500 KHz. A comparison of the theoretical and experimental BER curves is made to assess the performance of our design. |
