A radio transmitter for drones, quadcopters, and ultra-small satellites — picosatellites of the TinySat or PocketQube format with an edge length of up to 5 cm — has been developed at the Advanced Aerospace Engineering School (PIASH) of the Samara University named after Korolev. The project to create and test the radio transmitter received financial support from the Foundation for Assistance to Innovations in the form of a grant of 1 million rubles and must be implemented within a year. The first pre-production samples are planned to be manufactured and tested by the summer of 2025.
According to the university's press service, the radio transmitter is mounted on a carrier board with a size of only 4 square centimeters. It weighs no more than 15 grams, which is several times less than existing foreign analogues. The device is characterized by low power consumption, but is able to transmit significant amounts of information via radio channel. In particular, such transmitters can help a group of picosatellites deploy a satellite internet network on Earth.
We compared the characteristics of our transmitter with the data of popular high-speed foreign systems designed for use on satellites of a larger format than picosatellites - CubeSat, including comparing with such radio transmitters as the S-Band-Transmitter of the Bulgarian company EnduroSat, TX S-Band of the Dutch ISIS and TX-2400 of the British Clyde Space. The comparison shows that our system will be the lightest and most compact, for example, in terms of weight it will be almost five times lighter than the lightest transmitter TX-2400, weighing 70 grams.
The new Russian small radio transmitter has:
- increased data transfer rate — its peak speed will be up to 1.2 Mbps with the prospect of increasing to 2 Mbps. Its analogues have a transfer rate of a maximum of tens of Kbps;
- Ranging Engine technology, which measures the distance between the transmitter and the base station using special offset coding. This will allow for more accurate determination of the location of the spacecraft in orbit, and when using the transmitter on a quadcopter, it helps to partially do without the GPS system;
- S-band for communication, which is often used for terrestrial and satellite radio communications. The output power of the transmitter will be 30 dBm (1 W), the central carrier frequency is 2.45 GHz, the modulation technology is FLRC. The radio frequency path will be assembled on the basis of commercial electronic components with a high degree of integration, which will improve the efficiency of the device;
- unique software. It can be updated remotely from Earth. The software allows the radio transmitter to adjust the amplifier power depending on the measured parameters and adapt to the current parameters of the space environment. It also partially compensates for the gradual degradation of the transmitter in space.
It is already known that the transmitters will become part of the promising satellite platform of one of the Russian private space companies, which plans to create an orbital group of ultra-small satellites. They will be used to serve subscribers on Earth and transmit data from remote terminals.
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