Tracking quality measurements of Ground Station for Low Earth Orbit satellite

The poor quality position tracking of the satellite Ground Station (GS) for the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite is due to the low quality RF signal received. The BRITE-PL team (owner of the first Polish scientific satellite [6]) have had a lot of problems with optimizing the quality of the BRITE-PL-1-Lem satellite down-link. One of the investigated sources of trouble was the quality of the tracking ground station antenna systems. As a result, a procedure for measuring the quality of the tracking was prepared. The BRITE-PL team in co-operation with the Marcin Stolarski Laboratory (MSL) company has prepared an absolute measurement of tracking the antenna using an optical tracking real satellite (such as the International Space Station (ISS)) which reflects a lot of sunlight and can be easily observed in the dark sky. This paper describes what can be measured and how (it does not describe the calibration process) using this method based on the first experiment (which showed an uncalibrated (before calibration) antenna tracking system) at the BRITE-PL ground station located at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Science.