Monthly Meeting
May 11, 2026

Ground Communication System for OreSat, Oregon’s First Satellite
Most educational CubeSat projects have the same dilemma: not enough money to buy a commercially available ground station, and not enough internal experience and capabilities to build a reliable and inexpensive ground station in-house. We present a middle road to the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) vs DIY conundrum for ground stations: the University Class Open Ground Station (UniClOGS). UniClOGS is primarily designed for amateur radio satellites; amateur licensing allows for groups to share transmit-capable stations. UniClOGS is inspired by the extremely successful Satellite Networked Open Ground Station (SatNOGS), a global network of receive-only open-source ground stations hosted by the Libre Space organization. The design scales to a mission’s RF and orbit requirements without major rework, including a minimal case for hardware-in-the-loop testing on a “flatsat” integration test platform. In this talk we will share the ground station structure and operation for OreSat0.5, and how it changed over the years.

Speaker Biography – Glenn LeBrasseur:
Glenn LeBrasseur, KJ7SU is an industry advisor and the communications team lead for the Portland State Aerospace Society at Portland State University. Licensed as a professional engineer (PE) and advanced class radio amateur, he is the licensee for both existing OreSat CubeSats. Glenn’s prior work includes 36 years as a communications engineer working on mission-critical SCADA systems for local government doing embedded systems development and network system design.

Speaker Biography – Anna Meneely:
Anna Meneely, KM7CIT, is an undergraduate student in Electrical Engineering at Portland State University. Anna currently works as the lead electrical intern for OreSat CubeSat program and UniClOGS at Portland State Aerospace Society. She also serves as the Founder and President of Radio Astronomers & Amateur Radio Club at PSU. Her work focuses primarily on RF communication, with a pursuing interest in optics. Anna is also the parent of two sweet tuxedo cats, named Orion and Lyra!