How AWS Ground Station Works - AWS Ground Station
Data Delivery to Amazon S3Data Delivery to Amazon EC2More InformationService Terms

How AWS Ground Station Works

A satellite reservation is also known as a contact. Your satellite communicates with an AWS Ground Station antenna during contacts. You can reserve contacts through an API or through the AWS console by specifying location, time, and mission information. Your contact data can be streamed to and from an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance or delivered asynchronously to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket in your account.

You can create extensible and reusable configuration resources so that you have control over how AWS Ground Station antennas are configured during your contacts. Using mission profiles, you can specify where data is coming from, what its format should be, and where to send it.

Data Delivery to Amazon S3

With data delivery to Amazon S3, your contact data is delivered asynchronously to an Amazon S3 bucket in your account. Your contact data is delivered as packet capture (pcap) files to allow replaying the contact data into a Software Defined Radio (SDR) or to extract the payload data from the pcap files for processing. The pcap files are delivered to your Amazon S3 bucket every 30 seconds as contact data is received by the antenna hardware to allow processing contact data during the contact if desired. Once received, you can process the data using your own post-processing software or use other AWS services like Amazon SageMaker or Amazon Rekognition. Data delivery to Amazon S3 is only available for downlinking data from your satellite; it is not possible to uplink data to your satellite from Amazon S3.

Data Delivery to Amazon EC2

With data delivery to Amazon EC2, your contact data is streamed to and from your Amazon EC2 instance. You can process your data in real-time on your Amazon EC2 instance or forward the data for post-processing.

More Information

With AWS Ground Station you can access more than 125 services via satellite communications. Note the following:

  • You can receive narrowband RF data in S-band (2200 to 2300 MHz) or X-band (7750 to 8400 MHz) at bandwidths up to 54 MHz.

    • S-Band RF data is digitized and provided as a digital stream in VITA-49 Signal Data/IP format.

    • X-Band intermediate frequency (IF) data is digitized and provided as a digital stream in VITA-49 Signal Data/IP format.

  • You can receive wideband demodulated/decoded data in X-band (7750 to 8400 MHz) at bandwidths up to 500 MHz

    • X-Band intermediate frequency (IF) data is demodulated, decoded, and provided as a digital stream in VITA-49 Extension Data/IP format.

  • You can receive wideband Digital Intermediate Frequency (DigIF) data from 40 MHz to 400 MHz of bandwidth via the AWS Ground Station Agent.

  • You can transmit RF data in S-Band (2025 to 2120 MHz) at bandwidths up to 54 MHz.

    • The RF data is provided to AWS Ground Station as a digital stream in VITA-49 Signal Data/IP format.

  • You must run AWS Ground Station from an AWS Region that supports AWS Ground Station. To see a list of supported regions, see the global infrastructure Region Table.

  • You can deliver data to an Amazon EC2 instance running in the same region as the antenna, or you can use cross-region data delivery to send your data from an antenna to an Amazon EC2 instance in your preferred AWS Region. The following antenna-to-destination regions are currently available:

    • US East (Ohio) Region (us-east-2) to US West (Oregon) Region (us-west-2)

    • US West (Oregon) Region (us-west-2) to US East (Ohio) Region (us-east-2)

Service Terms

You may only use the Services to store, retrieve, query, serve, and execute Your Content that is owned, licensed or lawfully obtained by you. As used in these Service Terms, (a) "Your Content" includes any "Company Content" and any "Customer Content" and (b) "AWS Content" includes "Amazon Properties." As part of the Services, you may be allowed to use certain software (including related documentation) provided by us or third-party licensors.

Important

This software is neither sold nor distributed to you and you may use it solely as part of the Services. You may not transfer it outside the Services without specific authorization to do so.