Astrium Gmbh

Anthony Duncan Craig

Paul Stephen Norridge

Chiok Leong

Robert Julian Francis Hughes

Paul Simon Cornfield

Stephen Phillip Brown

Chiok Keng Leong

There is provided an apparatus for a satellite communication system comprising: a processor to determine at least one out of a phase offset for a frequency channel of a plurality of frequency channels demultiplexed from a carrier to compensate for group delay variation within the carrier and a gain offset for the frequency channel to compensate for gain variation within the carrier, wherein the processor is further configured to apply the at least one out of the determined phase offset and gain offset to the frequency channel before the carrier is reformed from said plurality of frequency channels. The invention therefore provides a way of digitally compensating for any undesired gain and group delay introduced by, for example, analogue components such as filters in the satellite communication system.

Compensation apparatus

A telecommunications satellite payload processing system having one or more identical generic integrated processor modules is provided. The number of integrated processor modules can be selected in accordance with the antenna and bandwidth characteristics of a specified mission uplink and downlink in relation to the characteristics of the integrated processor module.

Modular digital processing system for telecommunications satellite payloads

A digital method of determining and correcting beam-pointing for a communications spacecraft that has a digital beam-forming architecture for defining multiple spot transmit and receive beams, the antenna system of the spacecraft including a receive antenna (DRA, AFR) having antenna elements providing respective antenna element signals, and wherein at least one of the uplink signals to the spacecraft includes a beacon signal, and wherein the method comprises digitally weighting components of said beacon signal present in antenna element signals, combining such weighted beacon signal components such as to derive beam-pointing error signals, and employing the error signals to adjust beam-forming weight values of the receive antenna, in order to adjust the pointing direction of at least one signal beam. The digital weights for the beacon signal define difference radiation patterns for x, y axes of the antenna which vary rapidly in a range corresponding to the pointing errors most commonly occurring.

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Hitchin, United Kingdom

Anthony Duncan Craig