Development of University-Friendly CubeSat Bus and Ground Station Architecture Using Software-Defined Radios

The goal of the research and development presented in this paper is to introduce a CubeSat bus and ground station architecture that is made to be much more approachable to schools and universities. The three main pillars of the effort are low-cost, maintaining flexibility, and lowering the bar of entry. The presented CubeSat bus includes PyCubed board which houses most of the core satellite bus components on a single board. The board can handle main processing, data storage, UHF radio communication, telemetry sensors, and power management. This UHF radio is paired with a software-defined radio (SDR) that serves as the ground station radio. For a faster data rate downlink of payload data, a low-cost SDR (Ettus B205mini) is paired with a RaspberryPi processor. By leveraging the flexibility of SDRs, one SDR at the ground station is agile enough to provide UHF up/downlink for the CubeSat bus comm, as well as receiving S- or X-band payload data downlink. This proposed architecture will enable project teams to rapidly achieve a baseline capability with the satellite bus such that the development schedule and cost can be drastically reduced while providing the students with the full-cycle experience of satellite engineering