In recent years university students around the world have built a number of small educational satellites – CubeSats which have been launched in a low earth orbit. Often there is just one dedicated ground station for each CubeSat that may only be able to communicate with the satellite for less than an hour each day. This has made it difficult to make full use of the spacecraft and maximise the educational benefits.

However, this situation is about to change, thanks to the initiative of the International Space Education Board to establish a global ground station network for educational users. The Global Educational Ground Station Network (GENSO) will be a global infrastructure for future educational satellite projects.

The 9 objectives of GENSO are

1. To provide unparalleled near-global levels of access to educational spacecraft in orbit,
2. To allow remote access for operators to real-time mission data, even in cases when their local ground station is experiencing technical difficulties,
3. To provide remote control of all participating ground stations,
4. To optimise uplink fidelity by calculation of real-time link budgets and uplink station selection,
5. To perform downlink error-correction by comparing multiple data streams,
6. To define and implement a global standard for educational ground segment software,
7. To define and instantiate an optional well-defined standard solution for educational ground-segment hardware (in order to expedite participation in GENSO),
8. To respect the regulations relating to the use of the Amateur Satellite Service and to encourage the active participation of individual radio amateurs in the network
9. To support the IARU process for frequency coordination.

A team from AMSAT-UK (M3RRX, G4DPZ & G3VZV) continues to support this project by developing a standard ground station specification together with a full set of software drivers for the different hardware items that will be used. It is planned that Alpha testing will commence early in 2008. Full details can be found at www.genso.org

The European Space Agency (ESA) has published details of the 5th GENSO Workshop that was attended by John Rivett M3RRX on behalf of AMSAT-UK. The ESA news item can be seen at

www.esa.int/esaED/SEMQM953R8F_index_0.html

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