Hi all! In the process of rehabbing a dish and building a feedhorn for the space segment at 5.8 GHz. Choosing a radio and a conversion scheme that is both economical in the short term and with the ability to reuse the radio at a later date has been an interesting journey.

The radio that I've found is the ADF 7020 development board. There are several flavors of daughter cards for different licensed or ISM bands. The particular flavor I'm considering using is the licensed band (ham!) uhf radios (432).

Rather than reprint the data sheet, feel free to make google your friend! Short synopsis is that it natively supports what looks like more than a few common modes of demodulation for the type of data as well as data rates compatible with satellite data downlinks. Additionally, there is the capability to slew the frequency via electronic frequency control OR via data in. Smells like an application of an arduino playing DTE for an RS 232 connection. The arduino can be driven by data from the dde interface from either Orbitron or Satpc32!

Frequency conversion scheme will use a mixer and yig with a synthesizer. This sounds like a difficult approach. Most of the heavy lifting has been done by John Miles ke5fx. Driving the yig is quite straight forward using either a parallel port or Arduino or such.

Mixer is a Hittite microwave dev board bought for 16 bux shipped on epay. This is flat out the tiniest thing I've ever worked on. Pictures to come!! Watch my flickr page.

The mixer should support both the data radio and a funcube dongle via a mini circuits power divider.

The key is most of this gear is capable of being repurpoused to Alexander, Graham and Bell when they're deployed.

Sorry as I've left out more than I've included, I'm afraid. 73 de Norm n3ykf