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Equipment & facilities

Anechoic Chamber 

Anechoic Chamber and RF measurement facilities

Our microwave anechoic chamber has a volume of one hundred cubic metres, capable of performing far-field and near-field radiation measurements, can automatically measure up to 26GHz. 

In addition, a comprehensive selection of RF and microwave-based apparatuses are available to support indoor and outdoor channel measurements using 60GHz transceivers. MIMO antenna test facilities are supported with RF front end and FPGA modems.

picosat image

Picosatellite (Engineering model)

This picosat is an engineering model of 2p-satellite developed in-house at Bradford-Renduchintala Centre for Space AI. It is composed of five different segments:

  • A 3D-printed 2p-satellite frame structure 
  • An on-board computer in the form of Raspberry Pi Zero
  • A Payload board holding different sensors such as camera, temperature sensor, GPS module and accelerometer etc
  • Communications board responsible for managing satellite radio operations using transceiver and Antenna
  • EPS system for satellite power management which includes battery, charger module and solar cells etc

Satellite Ground Station at Bradford-Renduchintala Centre for Space AI

In-House Satellite Ground Station

Our in-house satellite ground station operates in the VHF and UHF amateur satellite bands 145.80 - 146.00MHz, 435 - 438MHz and 1260-1270Mhz (u/l only). It comprises of three systems:  A fixed antenna setup consisting of pair of 3 element beam antennas set up for dual-polarisation with a gain of 5dBi  and beamwidth of about 120o, facilitating very good coverage on almost any bearing.  A steerable high gain VHF/UHF beam antenna utilising a Yeasu G-5500 positioner for accurate tracking with horizon-to-horizon coverage. A portable setup with medium gain beam antenna on lightweight positioner and tripod which can be utilised in the field. At the heart of these systems are ICOM dual band, full duplex, all-mode transceivers (IC-9700, 821 & 820) with a preset maximum output power of 10W to support both voice and data (1200 PSK and FSK) and 9600 GMSK. The radios are connected to PC based software for satellite prediction, doppler correction, positioner control and data collection/decoding.

ublox gnns kit

u-blox GNSS Module 

The u-blox EVK-8/EVK-M8 GNSS evaluation kit, donated by u-blox, enables simple evaluation of the high performance u-blox 8 and u-blox M8 positioning technology. The built-in USB interface provides both power supply and high-speed data transfer, and eliminates the need for an external power supply. u-blox 8/M8 evaluation kits are compact, and their user-friendly interface and power supply make them ideally suited for use in laboratories, vehicles and outdoor locations. Furthermore, they can be used with a PDA or a notebook PC, making them the perfect companion through all stages of design-in projects. The kits are to be used with a PC via USB interface. USB drivers are provided with the software package.

USRP image for space centre

GNU Radio

The Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) platform can be used for a wide range of RF applications from DC to 6 GHz. A USRP Software Defined Radio Device provides a software-defined RF architecture to design, prototype, and deploy wireless systems with custom signal processing. Hardware options range from low-cost to high-performance radios with large, open FPGAs. It supports Python, C, LabVIEW or open-source code.

The USRP Bus Series provides a fully integrated, single board, Universal Software Radio Peripheral platform with continuous frequency coverage from 70 MHz – 6 GHz. The TwinRX daughterboard for the USRP software-defined radios is a dual-channel superheterodyne receiver that offers wide dynamic range and accurate phase synchronization with LO sharing for spectrum monitoring and direction-finding applications.

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Cleanroom

The cleanroom facility (Monmouth) for picosatellite platform development at Bradford-Renduchintala Centre for Space AI is an enclosed space in which airborne particulates, contaminants, and pollutants are kept within strict limits. The cleanroom is used in the manufacture and servicing of hardware such as integrated circuits (ICs) and hard drives and in the same way for small satellites to keep the hardware clean from potential hazardous dust particles and also control the temperature and humidity of the development environment.

Electronics Lab

Electronics Lab

The Electrical and Electronics Lab facility provides a wide range of hardware and software facilities for undergraduate and postgraduate programme delivery including both analogue and digital electronics kits, power supplies, oscilloscopes, soldering equipment and accessories, FPGA boards, microcontrollers such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi and most popular sensors for lab exercises and projects. A suite of software packages are also installed to support MEMS development.

Teaching Labs at Bradford-Renduchintala Centre for Space AI

Teaching Lab

This teaching lab is dedicated for delivering undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, CPD and training courses at the space centre. It houses a state-of-the-art interactive smart screen, a VZ-3neo.UHD visualizer system. A suite of industrial grade and open-source software packages are installed for system analysis and performance evaluation.  

 

Software

ANSYS-STK to simulate Antenna design and placement. Understanding the factors affecting antenna performance when installed on real-world platforms is crucial to a sustainable design process.

Arduino is an Open-source electronic prototyping platform enabling users to create interactive electronic objects.

Cadence - Microwave Office Delivers Accurate Simulation for RF/Microwave Product Development. Ensure Greater Engineering Productivity and Accelerate Design Cycles.

CST-Microwave Studio is a high-performance 3D EM analysis software package for designing, analysing and optimising electromagnetic (EM) components and systems.

Matlab is a programming and numeric computing platform used by millions of engineers and scientists to analyse data, develop algorithms, and create models which also includes AI and Machine Learning (ML) model targeting different problems.

Microsoft Visual Studio dev tools & services make app development easy for any developer, on any platform & language.

NS2/NS3 are Open-source tools for network simulations which provide a comprehensive set of network protocols including satellite, mobile cellular, Wi-fi, Ethernet and Bluetooth protocols.

OpenSCAD is a free software application for creating solid 3D computer-aided design objects.

Ray is a high-performance distributed execution framework targeted at large-scale machine learning and reinforcement learning applications.

SatPC32 displays the audibility-areas of one or several selected satellites within a world-map and shows the results in text-lines below the map.

TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks.

Ultimaker Cura is an open source slicing application for 3D printers.

Virtualbox/Vmware is an Oracle hypervisor for running virtual machines (VMs), whereas VMware has many products for running VMs in various scenarios.

Weka stands for Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis, developed at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License, and the companion software to the book "Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques".