As more and more earth observation data is being beamed from satellites, the infrastructure on the ground has to be more flexible, cost-effective and scalable to meet the demand. The infrastructure needs to be agile enough to process the signals and download the data based on changing and on-the-fly demand.

Kratos is at the forefront of virtualizing the ground system to deliver increased flexibility, resiliency, scalability, and security, all at lower costs. Kratos’ OpenSpace® quantumRX wideband software receiver dynamically adapts to meet the needs of earth observation data processing ground stations.

OpenSpace quantumRX is a complete wideband software receiver that uses no FPGAs or GPUs and runs on general purpose compute. quantumRX takes advantage of standard x86 server architectures and can be deployed easily on bare metal, virtual machines or in containers to meet different scalability needs, to drive higher capacity utilization and to reduce costs. The software-based receiver offers high performance for carriers from 500 Ksps to 350 Msps, supporting over 1 Gbps of throughput for downlinks. The performance of OpenSpace quantumRX is equivalent to hardware based EO and remote sensing receivers in the market. As a software only receiver, quantumRX is open standards based and easily scales unlike traditional hardware receivers that are proprietary and purpose built.

Benefits

• Downloads wideband earth observation and sensing data
• Easily fits into existing ground architectures
• Provides high performance and pass-to-pass configurability
• Scale on demand by spinning virtual instances up and down
• Lower costs by using less purpose built hardware
• Deploy flexibly on bare metal, virtually or in the cloud
• Easy to access and control with web based GUI

Key Features

• Carrier tracking, demodulation, bit-synchronization and digital processing of Digital IF signals at transmission rates adjustable up to 600 Mbps
• Digital signal processing implementation for flexibility to support different demodulation and processing schemes, and unlike legacy analog implementations, requires no calibration
• Supports downlink processing of BPSK, QPSK, OQPSK, and 8PSK
• The demodulation processing is supplemented by bit synchronization, Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) code conversion, digital filtering, and adaptive signal equalization for transmission optimization
• Multiple Forward Error Correction (FEC) options are currently supported including Viterbi and Reed-Solomon (RS)
• Output from the application is 1 GbE and 10GbE IP packets over Ethernet
• Open Industry-Standard interfaces