MEOSAR is a system designed to locate emergency beacons anywhere on the Earth in order to coordinate rescue efforts for people, vehicles and facilities in distress. It works by evaluating the time and the frequency of the beacon signal upon arrival at the receiver. From these the relative distance and velocity of the sender can be calculated if sufficient data points have been collected. It is beneficial to receive the beacon on several different spacecraft to optimise the accuracy of the trace.

Protection of space assets is becoming more and more important now that vital services and applications are depending on space infrastructure. This is particularly true in the domain of navigation where an increased number of applications like safety of life aeronautical services, critical bank transaction are relying on the services provided by the GNSS systems as the primary if not the sole source of the time and position solution.Designing robust telecommanding and Mission receivers is therefore one of the mandatory requirements for the design of future systems.

The objective of this activity shall be to investigate very high power amplifiers based on solid state European GaN technology. Unlike the amplifiers available today, GaN technology shall offer the possibility to build such HPA with only one power module at the output.

New architecture/design of the receiver processing chain can contribute in improving the performance. Recent increases in the computational power of computers and digital signal processors have made possible novel signal tracking techniques in GNSS receivers, so that both the Signal processing and the Navigation processing can be optimised or even combined in to one single estimation algorithm.