Performance and reliability evaluation of the s-band vienna satellite ground station

A satellite ground station for participation in the Canadian project MOST (Microvariability and Oscillations of Stars) has been set up and is being successfully operated since October 2003 at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Vienna. The location of the ground station is in a densely populated region of the town. The station has been built at costs affordable for Universities using off-the-shelf semi-professional equipment. The MOST satellite is in a polar sun synchronous orbit at a height of around 830 km. During overpass typically lasting 15 minutes the satellite has to be tracked by a 3 m dish with 0.5 precision. Since the start of the operational phase of the satellite, reliable data download is performed with the Vienna ground station contributing nearly half of the data traffic to the whole mission. This paper is an analysis of the performance and the reliability of the ground station using data collected during almost three years.