I may be missing something, but if I understand the following statement correctly:
"The ChipSats will transmit for approximately 10ms every 1-2 seconds, but the signal is going to be beneath the noise floor. Detecting the signal requires a pseudorandom noise (PRN) code, which Cornell will handle once the dataset is in hand." This would require the receiving station to digitize the entire pass band, plus and minus doppler, so that Cornell could apply the PRN to pull the signal out of the noise floor for demodulation. This is beyond the capability of the "typical" ham station but may be practical with some SDR based radios. Not making use of the PRN code for the capture will mean that it will be totally blind. i.e. there will be no way to know if you are really receiving anything and if the 20 dB antenna was pointed correctly. This is certainly a challenging task.
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