Ladies and Gents,

I am part of a CubeSat (small student satellite) team that is flying a Metal 2SHPn as our payload radio. The satellite will host a webserver and website on a beagle board and connect to the ground and the internet by the 2SHPn with large antennas. I have run the complex link budgets and it is feasible, but I need to know how to best set up the network. My team has relatively little experience with wireless networking and are asking for whatever help we can get.

Here is a basic powerpoint of our project for reference:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6xb8x5ug2lazl ... ation.pptx
The link budgets need to be updated but otherwise a good idea.

A basic diagram can be seen below:

internet----performance enhancing protocol and laptop----metal 2SHPn----3m dish - -s- -p -a - c- -e - - -helical antenna----metal 2SHPn---beagleboard---camera
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<ground station>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> <<<<<<<<<<satellite>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I was wondering what advice you have in terms of network configuration? Specifically:

1) How do we combat time to live timeouts? NV2 only gets us to 200km but we will need to transmit over longer distances.

2) What basic network set up would work best?

3) Should the satellite be the client or the AP?

4) What other modes or settings would help eek out every extra fraction of dB for our link margin?

5) Does anybody know how to make the data rate automatically change in order to maintain the link margin? i.e. low data rates over the horizon and higher data rates overhead

6) Does anybody know a way to have the radio switch antennas? The idea would be to have one helical antenna angled forward and one angled backwards to increase the margin.

7) Anything else you can suggest?

I realize this is a lot. Thank you so much and please let me know if you want more information on our satellite, mission, or team.


-Chris

The 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies [ISM band] are not authorized for ground-space and vice-versa communications.

At this height, how much noise you think the satellite receive?
And I think that for NV2, nstreme, airmax, w3, Ligowave, Motorola or 802.11a/b/g/n/ac not have so much high value for acceptable latency.
You need another protocol for 1000Km of distance...

Rextended, thank you for your reply. We have both IARU and NTIA approval to operate at 2.412 GHz so we are good to go on that front. If it can't be done with the supported protocols, can I still use routeros to modify a protocol or will I have to use new software?

Thanks!