SAR is especially useful for several applications: Sea ice monitoring, Cartography, Surface deformation detection, Glacier monitoring, Crop production forecasting, Forest cover mapping, Ocean wave spectra, Urban planning, Coastal surveillance (erosion), Monitoring disasters such as forest fires, floods, volcanic eruptions, and oil spills. Actually it receive data from the RADARSAT satellite and thanks to a special agreement with the USGS in May, 2001 UPRM is the only university under the American flag allowed to downloink data from Landsat 7. The station also has the capability of receiving MODIS-Terra images on a daily basis since 2002.

The 4.3M SAR antenna can downlink a 12 minutes pass at 105Mbps X-band (8.1 GHz). After the data is received it is down-converted to 375 MHz and sent to the demulator, screened by the spectrum analyzer, bit-syncronized, and finally processed by a custom-board-SGI 200 embedded processor.

The John Hopkins University (JHU) contracted UPRM to serve as a primary station for their FUSE project (launched in June 24, 1999). This $2,000,000 system is the connection between the FUSE satellite and their Satellite Control Center at JHU. FUSE, a PI-class NASA astronomy mission, explores the Universe through high-resolution spectroscopic at far ultraviolet wavelenghts (905-1195A), to address fundamental questions related to the origin of the Universe.

The HRPT system consists of a 1.2 meter diameter parabolic antenna enclosed in a radome and a 4 feet height steel pedestal. It is located at the rooftop of the RDC main building. Its location makes possible the acquisition of data at very low angles in all azimuth directions, covering from the Mid-Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico and from Brazil to Northern United States.

Data collected by HRPT system is actually used in different ways. NOAA-AVHRR data provides information of the Sea Surface Temperature and also permits to track hurricanes. SeaWiFS data is used to estimate phytoplankton bismass and it is being validated with field data in order to develop site-specific bio-optical algorithms.

The antenna receives the satellie telemetry in the L-band (1,698 MHZ) and down-converts it to 137 MHZ after an amplification stage. The amplified signal travels through the transmission line and is demodulated at the receiver.