Satellite communication channel model for rotary-wing vehicles in a mission analysis context.

Satellite communications are becoming increasingly important for rotary-wing vehicles applications, due to their efficiency and versatility. This work comes from the idea of allocating an antenna for satellite communication purposes on a remotely piloted helicopter and has the aim to recreate a SATCOM channel and bring it into a mission analysis context. The study starts with the study of the disturbances that the rotating blades cause on satellite communication when passing above the vehicle's antenna. After succeeding in the reproduction of the results found in the literature, the disturbance phenomenon is made dependent on the frequency used for the communication. At this point, it is analyzed the first mission scenario in which the helicopter communicates with a GEO satellite through Ka-band signals. This part of the work is focused on signal analysis in particular studying the power spectrum variations due to different orientations of the signal and to the rotation of the blades. Subsequently, there is an attempt to integrate the signal analysis in a mission scenario context, reproducing the L-band communications between the helicopter and the LEO Satellite constellation of Iridium Next. The global mission scenario is created in the STK environment exploiting the integration with Matlab. The goal is to obtain the highest level of automatization possible to make the scenario easily adaptable for other mission studies. Besides studying the quality of the signals through a link budget analysis, it is possible to verify the access time with every satellite according to the trajectory plan of the mission. Even if the simulation results show that constant access to the constellation is available with a good quality of the signals, for future works and iterations, it could be interesting to study how to improve communications and reduce handovers with satellites through the optimization of the flight plan of the vehicle.