Site Infrastructure - Considerations

 

In these tutorials we will look at the various component parts that make up a satellite ground station and the typical practices that engineers employ during satellite ground station engineering projects.

 

Site Infrastructure

Shelter
The shelter is used to house rack mounted equipment in a room that is located close to the antenna. The equipment can be some or all of the following equipment. The shelter is usually air conditioned and provides a computer room environment for the operation of the equipment.

A foundation is also required for the shelter as this is also a large heavy structure and the cable ducts usually run from the shelter to the antenna underground.

Equipment Racks
Within the shelter are housed 19inch equipment racks within which the indoor equipment is mounted and connected together to form the remainder of the antenna system.

Electrical Power and High Volume Air Conditioning (HVAC)
The shelter houses the main power distribution cabinets with all of the individual circuit breakers for both Short Break (standard) power and Uninterruptable Power Supplies (UPS). The bulk of the RF equipment is powered from the UPS in order to guard against power outages.

The shelter is air conditioned as the equipment produces heat and needs to be kept around 20 degrees C. In order to cool the shelter the air conditioning units are usually large and often have redundancy because in the event of a failure the equipment would overheat and the overall antenna system could fail.