I spent around three months with the team working inside a satellite ground station. I was there almost every day, watched it being built piece by piece, helped where I could, and learned a lot from the people doing the difficult work. But unlike many of the robotics projects I write about in this series, I cannot point to a major technical contribution and say, “I built that.”

This story is mostly about being there.

Three legendary alumni

The story started with Kafi, Maisun, and Antara, three alumni of BRAC University whom I still think of as legendary. Kafi and Antara had also served as presidents of the Robotics Club of BRAC University, ROBU. After leaving the club in the hands of the next generation, they went to Kyushu Institute of Technology in Japan for higher studies.

There, the three of them worked on BRAC Onnesha. BRAC University’s own account describes Kafi, Raihana Shams Antara, and Maisun Ibn Monowar as the students who designed, developed, and assembled the nanosatellite at Kyushu Institute of Technology.

I call BRAC Onnesha Bangladesh’s first satellite built by Bangladeshis. Some people use that title for Bangabandhu-1, which launched the following year as Bangladesh’s first geostationary communications satellite. The distinction I make is that Bangabandhu-1 was a Bangladeshi satellite manufactured abroad, while BRAC Onnesha was built by Bangladeshi students using the facilities at Kyushu. Readers can decide which distinction matters more.

Why a CubeSat needed a ground station

A CubeSat is a small satellite built in standardized units. A basic 1U CubeSat is roughly 10 by 10 by 10 centimetres. That small size is what makes CubeSats interesting for universities. You can put a focused experiment into low Earth orbit without trying to build an entire conventional satellite.

The idea is useful because space hardware is difficult to test properly on Earth. You can test electronics, antennas, sensors, and materials in a laboratory, but eventually some technologies need to experience the actual environment of space. A small satellite gives researchers a relatively practical way to do that.

Once the satellite is in orbit, you still need to communicate with it. One common way is through radio frequency, or RF.

If RF sounds unfamiliar, you already encounter versions of it all the time. Police communicating over handheld radios, pilots talking to air-traffic control, ships communicating over marine radio, and amateur HAM operators talking to one another are all using radio-frequency communication. The frequencies, equipment, protocols, ranges, and rules are different, but the basic idea is similar: information is being carried through radio waves rather than through a cable.

On the ground, buildings and the curvature of the Earth can block radio communication. A satellite has a different geometry. When it passes above you and remains within useful line of sight, a ground station can communicate with it. The opportunity does not last long, which makes every pass something the team has to prepare for.

From Kyushu to a rooftop in Mohakhali

Kyushu already had the facilities and experience to work with satellites. But the team wanted BRAC University in Bangladesh to be able to communicate with BRAC Onnesha too. That meant building a satellite ground station here.

A new room was built on the rooftop of Building 4 at BRAC University’s old Mohakhali campus, with the antenna installed beside it. BRAC University described it at the time as the country’s first satellite ground station built by university students.

The local effort was being driven by Shourobh and his team. Shourobh was an EEE student and one of the strongest electrical engineers I knew at the university. What stood out even more was his leadership. Technical ability and the ability to make people want to work with you do not always come together. With him, they did.

He had already worked on projects such as mission-controlled drones for crop-health monitoring, and he was the person many EEE students went to when they were stuck. The team at Kyushu collaborated with his team in Bangladesh while the ground station slowly came together.

I helped Shourobh’s team with different tasks during that period, but I do not want to exaggerate my role. I was not one of the people solving the hardest ground-station engineering problems. I was a junior who was close to the team, curious about everything they were doing, and useful when there was something I could help with.

Years later, while checking the details for this post, I found something that confirmed my memory. BRAC University’s report on the ground station actually lists me among the students who worked on it. I mention that not to make my contribution sound larger, but because memory becomes unreliable after enough years. In this case, I really was there. I simply was not one of the main people driving the project.

Building something nobody around us had built before

The ground station had a different kind of difficulty from most of our robotics projects. If I was building a robot and needed an expensive component, the biggest problem was usually money. Here, money was only part of it.

Importing RF equipment involved permissions, paperwork, and government procedures. BRAC University management became involved while Shourobh and his team spent a lot of time dealing with offices and approvals. Eventually the core equipment arrived, but getting the parts into the country was itself part of the engineering story.

Even after the equipment arrived, nobody around us had previously built this kind of ground station. The Kyushu team could guide us remotely, but they were not physically on the rooftop in Mohakhali. A lot of the work still came down to studying, assembling, testing, discovering what did not work, and trying again.

We juniors were constantly curious. We would keep asking Shourobh what was happening, what had arrived, and what would happen next. Whenever something changed, we wanted to see it. We visited the half-finished rooftop room, inspected new components, and watched the station slowly become real.

We were curious, but Shourobh might have been the most curious person there. Nobody had a complete local playbook for how to do this. Not even the people leading it.

Then we met the HAM community

Along the way, we met another group of people I had barely known existed: the amateur-radio, or HAM, community of Bangladesh.

These were people who used radio as a hobby. They built stations, experimented with antennas, and communicated with other operators because they enjoyed it. The police walkie-talkie example from earlier gives the rough intuition, although amateur radio operates under its own frequencies and rules.

The HAM community was excited about the ground-station project and helped us. Satellite communication overlapped with the same world of radio equipment and licensing, so having licensed amateur-radio operators around mattered.

There was one problem: Bangladesh had not held a HAM licence examination for a long time. The ground-station project gave everyone another reason to push for one. BRAC University and members of the HAM community worked to make the examination happen, and eventually we got our chance to sit for it.

I failed.

There is no complicated engineering explanation for that. I was too confident and did not study properly.

Waiting for something to pass over Bangladesh

BRAC Onnesha eventually travelled to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX CRS-11 and was later deployed into low Earth orbit from the ISS. BRAC University documented the deployment and first orbit as it happened.

To us as students, even the journey there felt surreal. SpaceX launches and events around the deployment were streamed online, and we would arrange gatherings at the university to watch. Because of the time difference, some of those events happened late at night in Bangladesh. That was how staying at the university overnight started becoming normal.

Once the satellite was in orbit, there was no convenient appointment saying it would come back above BRAC University at 3:00 PM. Its orbit could be predicted, so we knew approximately when passes would happen, but they could come during the day or in the middle of the night.

BRAC Onnesha passed over Bangladesh around four to six times a day. During each pass, the satellite was only within our useful line of sight for a short window.

The antenna on the rooftop was motorised. When a satellite entered the useful part of the sky, the antenna could point toward it and move as the satellite crossed overhead. Then the opportunity was gone until another pass.

What came through the speakers did not resemble a Facebook or WhatsApp message. To an inexperienced ear it could sound like a sequence of beeps, tones, and bursts of noise. Different satellites transmitted different types of data, and the station could receive openly available signals from satellites other than BRAC Onnesha as well.

One of the things that fascinated me most was seeing raw radio data turn into something recognizable. BRAC University wrote at the time that the station could receive satellite data and topographical imagery, and that the team was already receiving openly available data from weather satellites such as NOAA-18 and NOAA-19.

Watching an image slowly emerge from something that had arrived as radio signals from an object moving above the Earth made the whole project feel much less abstract.

Three months in the lab

The funny part is that my home was very close to the university. I had no practical reason to sleep there.

I just enjoyed being with the team.

My routine became simple. I attended classes during the day, went home for an hour to freshen up, then came back to the lab. There was usually something happening: a satellite pass, a component to look at, another project someone was building, a discussion that continued too late, or simply a group of people who did not feel like going home yet.

During those months I also worked on several of my own projects. Somewhere inside that same period, I started working on what would become the most important robotics project of my university life: BRACU Duburi. Shourobh helped our team a lot with that project too.

But that belongs to another part of this series.

Then everyone moved on

Eventually Kafi and Antara returned to Bangladesh and joined BRAC University. The ground station was no longer a half-constructed room that a group of curious students kept visiting. It had become a real lab with people who knew what they were doing, and the rest of us gradually returned to our own work.

The next time you hear pilots talking to air-traffic control, ships communicating over marine radio, or HAM operators speaking across long distances, you now know roughly what is happening underneath. They are different radio systems, but they all belong to the much larger world of RF communication that I first got to see closely from that rooftop lab.

I did not design the satellite, build the core ground-station electronics, or solve its hardest engineering problems. I helped where I could, stayed close to the work, and learned from the people who did.

For about three months, that was enough. I attended classes, went home to freshen up, returned to the university, waited for satellites to pass over us, worked on whatever project I had at the time, and eventually fell asleep somewhere in the lab. I still remember those months less for what I contributed and more for how much fun it was to be there.