Our new Space at Virginia Tech building is really going up fast and should be open by June. I have really been taken aback (pleasantly surprised) by how much investment Virginia and Virginia Tech is putting into Space engineering and science. This facility is 20,000 square feet /1800 sq. meter, clean rooms, and my student Zach Leffke (KJ4QLP) has constructed a functional ground station, built GnuRadio apps to demodulate telemetry, runs the facility remotely, send video, audio, and telemetry decodings to remote locations. He demonstrated this capability at the Wireless Innovation Forum last fall to our sponsor who was wowed.
The new facility ground station will be built out starting this summer after the building opens (again, work done by Zach and other students).
http://www.space.vt.edu/ shows the building (for now) and the following link shows the current faculty affiliates and their interests
http://www.space.vt.edu/people/index.html
Troy Henderson and I have a dynamics and constellation modeling student we share. Bailey, Henderson, Fish, Earle, and I have funded satellite construction on the same launcher with AMSAT Fox and others proposed.
We are having fun down here in the Appalachian mountains!
Bob