Hello from r/spacefleet | Communications Workgroup | Forum

Excellent!  People with your skill set are sorely in need.  Basically, communications is the thing that so far everybody in the project seems to know the least about.  We have had exactly one person who appears knowledgable about it make this post to our subreddit.  It sounded like he knew what he was talking about, but I can't really be sure.  He hasn't said anything else since then so I don't know if he is still around.

Basically, if you feel up to it, you can pretty much take lead of the Communications Workgroup for now.  Feel free to start writing posts in this forum explaining your thoughts and ideas.  You can put some stuff in the CW's part of the Wiki if you want to – outlining the major problems the group will face, etc.

About the only things I can suggest keeping in mind right now are  the following:

• We are probably not going to be able to afford a network of large dishes for radio communications.  The best we will likely be able to manage is a world wide network of radio hams using comparatively low end equipment.  We should probably design our communication systems so that this approach has a hope of working.
• It would be awesome for our navigation work if the communication systems were such that we can get rough estimates of the spacecraft's distance from Earth and velocity by measuring the time required for round trips by radio waves and measuring Doppler shift – if off-the-shelf equipment somehow automatically corrects for Doppler shifts and throws away the actual shift values, we will need to come up with another solution because we will want those measurements very much.
• If during design you (and anyone else who helps you) can keep a running ballpark estimate of how much power the comms gear on the spacecraft will consume, you would be helping out the power supply guys (in the Spacecraft Engineering Workgroup) tremendously.

Welcome aboard and have fun!  Learning more about radio has been on my list of things to do for a long time so I will probably keep my eye on this workgroup as my time allows.  I probably won't actually be able to contribute much, though, because I do not have the knowledge.