UHF Rocket Telemetry

I am currently in the process of developing a UHF radio transceiver for the Olin College rocketry team. It will allow for a reasonably high bandwidth and low latency half-duplex communication link to and from our spacecraft. The current configuration uses a SPI configurable COTS encoder board to generate a CSS encoded signal. A CSS encoding scheme was chosen due to its high robustness to channel noise. The encoded signal is amplified filtered and by a switched 4 watt RF power amplifier. The ampilfier gain is granularly configurable using a combination of the built-in “high/low” gain control and electronics allowing for arbitrary adjustment of the amount of power supplied to the chip. The board also features a custom recieve pipeline including a low-noise amplifier and additional filtering. Switching between the sending and recieving pipelines is managed by a pair of SPDT RF switches.

The separate components of the prototype transceiver front-end were designed to link together using a series of SMA patch cables to allow for detailed testing and characterization of each component before integration.

Currently the power amplification gain control system is malfunctioning.

More updates to come…