XBand

April 2021:

XBand revisited the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) document designed last summer and started to onboard Electrical Engineers to prepare for summer testing. Several test boards are being developed to verify theoretical design during last summer's SURP.

November 3rd 2020:

The XBand team characterized their Software Defined Radio’s noise floor, which will aid in finding the right LNA for the team’s Front End. They are close to manufacturing their Tx board and are designing the Rx board.

October 7th 2020:

EE: The team has selected a Software Defined Radio (SDR) to act as the transceiver's back end, and have also programmed the SDR with GNU Radio to transmit and receive BPSK modulated signals. Additionally, we’ve designed both the transmit chain PCB for the front end and the patch array antenna.

Aero: Aero member’s have defined customer requirements, decomposed to component level requirements, and created a work breakdown structure. We’ve also defined interfaces using N-squared diagrams and an Interface Control Document (ICD) and defined the concept of operations.

The team plans to design the receive chain PCB for the front end, get boards and antenna manufactured, and obtain S-parameters from the antenna to check for tuning and efficiency. They are also planning to test the boards and their components to see if they are mixing, filtering, and amplifying the signals up to the requirements. In addition, they plan to run a loopback test on the whole system with attenuators to simulate the path loss.

August–September 2020:

The deep space communication system SURP is a research project focused on developing a small satellite comms system for a potential lunar mission. The team is working on the development of the RF front end to the X-Band transceiver such as developing schematics and layout for the prototype board. They are also focusing on the systems engineering of the project such as developing requirements and the mission concept of operations.