William:
AMSAT allowed a student to take on the construction of an S band amplifier as a senior design project (Steve Hendricks). He submitted this S band amplifier design to a large competition in California. It was an "efficiency" competition. The student received honorable mention for several reasons:
A) He was the only undergraduate submitting (he is taking the SDR course Brickle and I are offering now) B) He came in fourth overall C) His amplifier was at 2.4 GHz. All other winners were around 1 GHz. D) His amplifier was well above the minimum power output and used some very interesting GaN devices (very hard, rad hard almost surely).
Steve Cripps was the chief judge and gave Hendricks the honorable mention and made quite a deal of his participation.
http://www.ebookmall.com/ebook/98577-ebook.htm http://www.amazon.com/RF-Power-Amplifiers-Wireless-Communications/dp/0890069...
Hendricks is a senior at the College of New Jersey which has an excellent engineering program and currently employed part time at LTI (the company where K2UYH and N2UO "live and work").
John Stephensen, KD6OZH has done a design for the 70cm RX and has agreed to do any L band receiver work as well.
Marc Franco, N2UO is doing our 2 meter amplifier design.
In all cases, we are planning on polyphase HELAPS (EER) to gain efficiency and with predistortion in DSP and sensors on the amplifiers. We should have excellent efficiency and very good IMD.
Best 73's Bob N4HY
William Leijenaar wrote:
Hi AMSATs,
--Snip-- "If there is sufficient folks and money to support such an independentw project, I would suggest hiring established transponder engineers to do theww actual design and construction...i.e someone known and respected by thew "Amsat family". Afterall, such a module must satisfy all the spacecraft requirements and testing to qualify to be included and flown."
What are the specifications for this s-band transponder ? Like: Power supply, RF power output, physical size, input IF etc... w I will have a look what is possible...
73 de PE1RAH William Leijenaar
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