Today’s episode focuses on the RF side of CubeSat development, both on the spacecraft and the ground station side. I’ll be chatting with Jose Pastrana and Joe McPherson from Rhodes College in Memphis Tennessee about various challenges we faced while working with our UHF transceiver (transmitter/receiver), how we solved these problems while trying to transmit data from the spacecraft to the ground station. I’ll also go into how we went about setting up a UHF ground station at ASU so we could communicate with Phoenix after it deployed.

Since Phoenix launched, I’ve been contacted by a handful of student teams who were interested in learning more about what made Phoenix successful, both on the technical side and programmatically. This episode is the first of a series of episodes that I plan to do that cover several aspects of CubeSat development for undergraduate student teams based on our experience working on Phoenix over the years. Some will be with student teams, others just me, but hopefully all will prove useful or insightful to you in some way, whether you are working on a spacecraft of your own, or if you’re just interested in what working on these projects is like.