Development and testing of ground segment software for mission control of small Earth orbiting satellites

Despite the existence of several orbit prediction software, such as Gpredict, Orbitron, WXtrack, Predict and Nova, a meager chance of customizing or developing extra modules arises. The present work is devoted to the design, development and test of an orbit prediction software suite for ground station. The newly developed software, called AMGS - Orbit Predictor, is written in Python 3 and is capable of predicting position and velocity of a target satellite, starting from a TLE orbital dataset and using SGP4 orbit propagator provided by PyEphem libraries as software core. Featuring antenna rotor and radio add-in controllers, AMGS - Orbit Predictor allows the user to track the target satellite through an interface with Hamlib, as well as tune a SDR to compensate Doppler frequency shift. A comprehensive test campaign has been performed, devoted to verify the reliability and the robustness of the software and its modules under operational conditions, using both self-generated and real satellite pass. The interpretation of such test results shows that our software is capable of tracking a passing target with the ground segment antenna and tuning the external SDR properly, making it a viable alternative to the actual Forlì Ground Station flight dynamics software and paving the way to future modules implementations according to user necessities.