HyperTrack™
Software Instruction
106
Quasonix, Inc.
8 Appendix A -
HyperTrack™ Control System
Auto-tracking antennas have operated by the same basic principle since the 1960s: design the antenna to scan a
small area around the target and use the amplitude modulation (AM) thereby induced to steer the antenna toward the
target. The specific implementations of this scheme have improved over the years, but there has been no
fundamental change to the basic control mechanism
–
until now.
Starting in early 2017, Quasonix began shipping all 3rd Generation RDMS™ telemetry receivers with the
HyperTrack™ control interface, which is revolutionizing the way auto
-tracking antennas function.
Latency in the antenna tracking control loop leads to jitter in the antenna position. HyperTrack™ replaces the
traditional AM and AGC analog signals with a single high-speed serial digital interface. Furthermore, all real time
processing is done in FPGAs, where signal timing is precisely controlled and completely deterministic. This reduced
latency and smaller latency variation ultimately results in faster, more accurate tracking. This is particularly
important at C band, where the antenna beamwidth is smaller than it has ever been at L or S band. A functional flow
diagram of a HyperTrack™ system is shown in
Figure 127: Functional Flow in HyperTrack
™
Ground Station
