I am in the process of putting a group together of local amateurs to build and launch a triple Cubesat. The club will be called the Northern Lakes Amateur Satellite Organization. we have already drawn up the bylaws and a locale ham, an attorney is preparing the paper work. The website should be up in about two weeks. Our goals are to put together a single ham radio payload in a cubebesat. Have spoken to several persons in the Amsat NA origination. They have agreed to do the peer review for us. As we are week in electronics part of it. I am a retired aerospace machinist and have for the last three years been doing a lot of the mechanical work for Amsat. So the mechanical side of it will be easy for us. On the payload we have not made a final decision. Here is some of our ideas.
1: Leverage from the electronic package that is planned for Suitsat 2. This our preferred payload. As it would give us a lot of flexibility with the SDR transponder. Only problem is when is suitsat 2 going to be ready? If it is going to take to long our group may not want to wait.
2: Would be to build a transponder with hamtronics kits. Upside of this is that all parts are off the shelf and could be easily assembled in few months. Bob Bruninga has been using them for some time with success.
3: Ask someone to build us a transponder who has more experience than us. On the orbit. To me the ideal orbit would be an MEO orbit. To see what that would mean I suggest David's G0MRF http://www.g0mrf.freeserve.co.uk/MEOSAT.htm website I have seen some talk on the web that that SpaceX maybe launching cubesats into MEO. Otherwise there seems to be launch availability in LEO.
Fred KF0AK