SETTERS
The SETTERS project is managed by Telespazio France, with a number of elements of the development and integration subcontracted to Telespazio UK.


It is a renewal of the existing REGATES system, which is a recording, transfer and remote management system for telemetry data, received by a number of monitoring stations situated in various geographical locations. A simplified diagram of the system appears below:

The SETTERS system is composed of two main functions:

  • PREPARATION is an off-line sub-system used for designing the whole system to be monitored and controlled. It runs on a standalone platform at the PTG Central site.
  • ">EXPLOITATION is a real-time sub-system used for performing the monitoring and control of the system previously designed by the PREPARATION sub-system. It comprises three major types of platforms – namely the Servers, PTG Central (for remote station management), and the remote Station sites.

All the SETTERS platforms are running under CentOS 7 64-bit, and comprise a Java GUI front-end, with most back-end processing performed by C language modules. Inter-process communication is via shared memory and message queues. It uses MariaDB for database storage, and makes extensive use of shell scripts (primarily Bash and Perl) for installation, start-up, configuration and control functions.

The Telespazio UK development team has worked extensively on various parts of the SETTERS system, at both a high level architectural and low level implementation role. Some highlights include:

  • Porting the entire REGATES codebase from 32-bit CentOS 5 to 64-bit CentOS 7, including updating required COTS tools, development environment, build and installation scripts
  • Research, design and implementation of the multi-site SETTERS station, which involved a major architectural change to the way SETTERS stations are managed; the SETTERS station includes a synoptic diagram which summarises the status of other stations being managed
  • Design and implementation of a new system test and verification system, to analyse the quality of the software
  • Design and implementation of a SETTERS resource monitoring system, reporting via a dedicated web interface
  • Definition of The Abstract Drivers Layer, a software module in C++/Boost written to enable the integration of a plug-in driver with multiprotocol support (HTTP, TCP, UDP, VISA, SNMP), able to communicate and interact with remote devices from Router to Antenna controller.

The new system will go live later in 2020.