DIT commissions Tanzania's first satellite ground station.
Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology now has a working ground station — the first of its kind built in Tanzania — capable of tracking, receiving data from, and sending commands to TanzaniteSat-1, Tanzania's first satellite.
What was commissioned
The ground station spent a week being installed and tested by REMOS Space Systems AB, with the company's CEO, Dr. Moses, on site the whole time leading the work and training the DIT team on it directly. It's now physically installed and commissioned — software and RF systems have been tested live, including a confirmed antenna slew test and a loopback communications test.
Why it matters
A ground station is the part of a satellite mission that stays on Earth — the link that lets a team track a spacecraft's position, pull down its data, and send it commands. Without one, a satellite is just hardware in orbit that nobody can talk to. DIT's is built specifically to support TanzaniteSat-1 once it launches.
The partnership
Three organizations, one mission.
DIT
Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology built TanzaniteSat-1, a 1U CubeSat, and now operates the ground station built to support it.
INP-HB
Institut National Polytechnique Félix Houphouët-Boigny partnered with DIT on the satellite build.
REMOS Space Systems
Supplied the Expedite ground station platform and led the on-site commissioning, with CEO Dr. Moses personally overseeing the installation and training.
TanzaniteSat-1 will deploy via JAXA and UNOOSA's KiboCUBE program, released from the ISS's Kibo module using the J-SSOD deployer.
What it's built of
UHF & VHF tracking antennas
Mounted on the DIT rooftop, overlooking the Dar es Salaam skyline.
Expedite modem & control systems
The rack running REMOS's Expedite platform — the software layer that actually talks to the satellite.
Live tracking video wall
A dedicated control center where the Expedite software's satellite tracking runs on a wall-mounted display.
From commissioning week
Photos land here as soon as they're added to the repo.
Dar es Salaam skyline
the DIT team & Dr. Moses
at the video wall
To REMOS Space Systems AB and Dr. Moses, for a week of on-site work that took this from installed hardware to a commissioned, tested ground station — and to INP-HB, for the partnership that got TanzaniteSat-1 built in the first place.