An air-to-ground free-space optical communication system has been designed and partially developed. The design covers both the communications between the airborne and the ground station, and the acquisition, tracking and pointing. A strong effort has been made in order to achieve the minimum payload power, size and weight, for which a MEMS modulating retroreflector has been chosen. In the ground station, a new technique for fine pointing, based on a liquid crystal device, is proposed and will be demonstrated, as well as other improvements with the aim of optimizing the ground station performance.
@article{arxiv.1507.08637,
title = {Low-Impact Air-to-Ground Free-Space Optical Communication System Design and First Results},
author = {Alberto Carrasco-Casado and Eva Oton and Ricardo Vergaz and Morten A. Geday and Jose M. Sanchez-Pena and Jose M. Oton},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.08637},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
4 pages, 9 figures, IEEE 2011 International Conference on Space Optical Systems and Applications (ICSOS). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1506.08854