SGS-2021-005A conventional ground station can establish a
single downlink with only one satellite at a time through
steerable high-gain antenna. In addition to the lack of tracking
more than one satellite at once, such single radio communication
is highly vulnerable to outages when experiencing severe
degrading circumstances or even with steering engine failures.
Accordingly, such problematic single radio link would leave the
operator with no alternative options to overcome the
consequences. This work exhibits a solution to the ground
station through networking. Multiple ground stations, with
omnidirectional antennas instead of the steerable directive ones,
can be engaged in a collaborative network to receive multiple
versions of the same transmitted data for processing and
combining. The suggested receive diversity combining is
performed at a virtual ground station which utilizes a combining
algorithm to help detect the original data from the received
versions with less errors and hence reflecting more efficient and
reliable services. To exploit this aimed diversity gain, a simple
combining algorithm is also developed in this article. The
simulation results from the proposed scheme have indicated
significant performance enhancement over the single site
ground station. This cooperative scheme will not only improve
the system performance but also offer to track more than one
satellite at a time
