CASR - CubeSat Amateur S-Band Radio
CASR's goal is to provide the Amateur Satellite community with an open sourced S-Band radio and antenna design!
More specifically, the radio is designed to be integrated in a CubeSat, or a small satellite, to provide University and amateur teams an affordable communications module. The final cost of the project will be kept under 1000$, which is around 14 000$ less than the other commercially available alternatives.
What drove our team to start this project in the first place was the difficulty our University' satellite team faced while looking for small, affordable and performant communications module. To this day, the team was always forced to purchase radios on the market that were bulky, and cost upwards of 10 000$ a unit! With the introduction of CASR, this large expense can be avoided on top of providing the students and team members with hands on experience at assembling, validating and programming our radio.
In addition to open sourcing the design, we will also open source our design process so that future work can be done on it to improve the design. This also allows new students and junior engineers to learn about the design process of RF electronics and antennas. All will be available in May, when this project is officially released.
The last but important part of this project will be to send it to space! It is currently scheduled to be integrated on SC-FREYR, a Canadian CubeSat that will be deployed into space in 2026. From this mission, CASR will be able to obtain some in-orbit testing and flight heritage. CASR and its first home, SC-FREYR, can be seen below!
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