Hi there squid,
If Aaron told you about this site, them I'm the one who told him about it. :) If not, that's just a huge coincidence. Anyway, welcome to CSTART! Glad to have you aboard, we really are in desparate need of communication savvy types at the moment.
Just to catch you up very quickly (not sure how much Aaron told you), we have two projects at the moment – OHKLA, a "simple and realistic project" and CLLARE a "long term dream project", both of which will require communications work.
OHKLA is a project to get a hybrid fuelled rocket more than 100km above Earth, which is the internationally accepted "border of space". The rocket will be completely unmanned. Our main communication concerns will be (i) being able to find the avionics module when it lands so we can recover data. Some kind of system for broadcasting GPS coordinates would be useful here; (ii) possibly relaying sensor data (GPS, IMU, temperature and pressure, etc.) and possibly HD video back to Earth (ideally we will store all this locally on the avionics module if possible, but if we could broadcast it too incase the module doesn't survive the trip that would be ideal).
CLLARE is a huge project, a manned lunar landing. We will need extremely long range data, voice and video comms capabilities, the equipment will have to be able to survive about 6 days in space and, ideally, we'll need to be able to receive the data on Earth without needing huge, expensive dishes etc. Oh, we'd also love to be able to estimate spacecraft distance from Earth and velocity by measuring round-trip times and Doppler shift.
I can give you some more links to our discussion of these things later if you like, I don't want to overwhelm you for now. Just take some time getting used to the place. Feel free to ask any questions.
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