Recently NL-RIA’s partner RFx solutions managed to realize the first radarboard for the 35 GHz miniaturized altimeter. The design is based on work from Ozan Doğan, during his post-doc assignment. The development was sincerely delayed by Covid-19 and by the worldwide shortages in chips. But after a long period of waiting finally many components have arrived, sufficient to mount one of the three available, which was recently finalized.
Next step is testing the board, a truly exciting period, as it will learn us how well we are hitting targets on spectral purity, sensitivity, etcetera. The results will tell us where we stand and indicate how many design cycles still may be expected until the completion of the radar board on a sufficiently high TRL level for the cubesat altimeter to be tested in space. This is major input to the project proposal the team is currently working on. It is expected that this follow-on project will start before the end of the year. More information can be found in this post.