Aouda-Communication

Harald Fauland and Gernot Groemer (Austrian Space Forum) visited the group at their facility at the Mehrerau monastry, a very scenic setting for such a high-tech hobby. The Aouda-spacesuit communications team, led by Stephan Kirchmayer is currently planning the on-site communication system which is a challenging task. Although the System Requirements state only a 15km range-of-communication as a criterion, the high bandwidth requirements, mostly due to the fact that each of the simulated spacesuits and the Phileas-rover are continuously transmitting images and a plethora of medical and technical telemetry data. The high bandwidth also requires a fairly short wavelength, which in turn leads to the challenge that (nearly) line-of-sight communication might become a required operative border condition.

Nevertheless, at least audio communication will be done on a longer wavelenght, so that a direct visual contact with the field camp is not required and can be used as an additional emergency back-up communication solution. Options which are currently under scrutiny are D-Star (a japanese radio amateur protocoll), digital packet radio (allowing for up to 72 kBit/s in broadcast mode) and W-Lan. The latter solution was also the method of choice for the AustroMars Sisi-Rover, but turned out to be a challenging technology as we were using directional antennas and rather low-power output. The Aouda W-Lan configuration might be using a W-Lan booster transceiver, and as such allow for a sufficiently high bandwidth. All these options are currently under investigation and a decision is soon expected, as this choices have an impact on the computing requirements of the On-Board Data Handling team, headed by Klaus Bickert.