1.14 The sat-nms ACU Indoor Unit

The ACU indoor unit is a PC system based on the sat-nms M&C technology. Together with an antenna controller and a beacon receiver it builds the sat-nms antenna control system. Main features of this are:

• Monitoring and control of the concerned equipment.
• Satellite tracking using step track and orbit prediction tracking methods.
• Analysis and graphical presentation of the satellite tracking performance.

Using the sat-nms M&C platform as the basis, the ACU indoor unit also includes a lot of the benefits of the basic software:

• The software is highly modularized. The subsystems interfacing the tracking engine to the outside world may be configured to control third party products instead of the sat-nms outdoor unit or the beacon receiver.
• The user interface is very clear and contains data analysis tools to display in which way the antenna tracked the satellite.
• As with other implementations of the sat-nms M&C Software, the user interface is an platform independent Java program which may by run on any other computer in the LAN than the indoor unit itself.
• The indoor unit provides a event log database with a HTTP based interface to third party software.

The following chapters explain the concepts behind the sat-nms antenna control system and the architecture of specific configurations of the ACU. This is supplemented by a detailed description of all user screens and the meaning of all adjustable parameters.