Azerspace/Africasat into operation with GMV's control center

On April 1st 2013 the operation of the Azerspace / Africasat-1a satellite was handed over to Azercosmos.

Azercosmos OJS Co is a state owned entity with the Azerbaijan Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies as its single share-holder. It is headquartered in Baku, Azerbaijan. Azercosmos operates two ground stations, the main site is located outside Baku and the backup site is located in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan.

In 2010 Azercosmos contracted Orbital Sciences to supply a satellite with a ground control system for Azercosmos, and GMV won the bid to provide the ground control system. The ground system included hifly^® , focusgeo, magnet and smartHz products, as well as the servers, networking, baseband units and antennas and a carrier monitoring system. The ground system was located at the two Azercosmos sites as well as the MEASAT site outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Azercosmos, new to spacecraft operations, built the facilities for this program. GMV was involved in the early stages of site selection, through the construction to the installation and testing of its products in the newly completed facilities.

Right from the word go this has been a very challenging program as it was the first time GMV has been responsible for designing, supplying and verifying a complete ground system, including most GMV SW products for satellite control centers, the verification of antenna systems, baseband system with BBUs and a time and frequency reference system.

The SW products delivered to Orbital and Azercosmos included not only GMV’s well-known hifly^® and focusgeo products, but also some of GMV’s inhouse developments for the ground segment such as magnet for station monitoring and control or smartHz for link budget computation. This has been also the first ever magnet installation in a real operational environment.