Accurate Estimation of Vehicle Attitude for Satellite Tracking in Ka Band SOTM

The development of Satcom on-the-Move (SOTM) systems for land applications has led to the use higher frequency, with new problems that SOTM aeronautic systems do not own. Above all, the satellite tracking/pointing is a very critical issue in Ka band. For this reason, accurate open loop systems making use of inertial measurement system are fundamental. In order to improve the performance of these open loop systems and making them accurate for Ka band, novel solution in the prediction of the vehicle attitude are studied. In this paper a simple solution is proposed for the enhancement of the performance of inertial measurement system without changing architecture or adding new sensors, by using a tailored filtering and extended Kalman filters.