Overview
Marta Systems’ Direct-Readout Ground Stations receive the GOES-Variable (GVAR) high speed digital transmission from GOES spacecraft, or similar transmissions from GMS or Meteosat spacecraft, and produce sectorized imagery from the Visible, Infra-Red, Water Vapor and Sounder instruments.
The Direct-Readout Ground Station is provided as a complete solution, and includes a 3.0 meter antenna, L-band low noise amplifer/converter, RF signal demodulator, high-speed synchronous PCI interface, and a powerful workstation computer loaded with our Yosemite meteorological software suite.
Features
- Compatible with GOES-GVAR
- Capable of operating with GMS and METEOSAT (option)
- Sectorizer allows user selection of spacecraft, sensor, time-of-production, image size, image resolution and area of interest
- Sector list is stored as an XML document
- Sector capacity only limited by computer speed
- Full output resolution, captures all transmitted pixels
- Antenna may be located remotely
- Includes Yosemite Software Suite
The Yosemite Software Suite may also be purchased separately, configured for GOES-GVAR, for use with customer provided RF downlinks and/or server hardware.
Detailed System Information:
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Satellite Downlink
Optional non-penetrating roof mounts, antenna motor actuator and controllers are available.
During operation, satellite downlink performance can be monitored in real-time. Spacecraft scan information, errors, frame types, buffer status and signal strength parameters are all available.
Data Processing Computers
Servers and workstations are based on premium quality commercially available server computers, running either Microsoft’s Windows 7 Professional or Server 2008 R2 64-bit operating system. The computers are equipped with the latest generation of Intel multi-core processors, loaded with memory and RAID hard drives to achieve the highest level of performance and reliability.
The standard system includes one computer with Windows 7 Professional 64-bit operating system and a special two-channel high-speed synchronous PCI interface card for the satellite datastream.
Data Aquisition and Remote Antenna
After demultiplexing, the received data for any individual sensor, including the monitor and control frames, can be compressed and forwarded on separate TCP socket to other systems or software. Local data storage and TCP socket forwarding may be used simultaneously, or either may be disabled by the user.
If sufficient local network bandwidth is available, TCP socket data forwarding allows the Ground Station antenna system to be located any distance from the data processing system if local conditions preclude the installation of an antenna on site. The feature may also be used to provide redundancy in the event an antenna is destroyed or incapacitated.