The Transportable Adaptive Optical Ground Station, which was located at Tenerife (Spain) from 2014 until 2019 was shipped for a refurbishment and several enhancements to Switzerland. Following the refurbishment, a measurement campaign at the Swiss Optical Ground Station and Geodynamics Observatory Zimmerwald (Switzerland) was performed, in July/August 2021. The optical counter terminal for the experiments was the TDP1-LCT at the geostationary Alphasat satellite. In the seven weeks of the campaign, measurements for optical uplink communication at a rural site in Europe at an altitude of 900 meters to a GEO spacecraft were gathered. We give an overview of the improvements of the T-AOGS and the actual status after the refurbishment. We present the results of the link activities, e.g. the uplink budget (ground to space) and the dynamic of the atmosphere (scintillations index, number of fades, fade duration).
An important step towards reliable optical communication between ground and space is the characterization and understanding of atmospheric conditions – even when being at one place and performing links into one direction, but at different times. Within this paper the analysis of five years of optical links from a laser terminal on a geostationary satellite (TDP1-LCT on Alphasat) to ground (T-AOGS at Tenerife) is shown. The data, in total 40.2 h of reliable measurements extracted from 516 performed links, are spread over several times of the year and almost all times of day. For one of the main parameters describing the atmosphere (the Fried Parameter r0) a clear characteristic over the day is validated. For the up-link the influence of different transmitted beam divergence angles on the link budget in terms of mean power and fade statistic is shown. A short outlook on upcoming changes within the TDP-1 software and the TAOGS functionality is given.
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