The hardware that goes into the satellites will be determined by a lot of the same decisions as the hardware that went into the ground unit, with a few noted exceptions below. Once the plans for modulations schemes and such are narrowed down, the respective hardware units will be made to accommodate.

A notable factor is the power situation on the flight hardware verses the terrestrial units – there will naturally be of an abundance of it, and that will change / limit the parts we can choose from.

It will be prudent to include a programmable hardware chip (such as an Field Programmable Gate Array [FPGA]) on board so that we can change modulation schemes without too much complexity.

Given the bands being experimented with have not have yet been proven reliable we plan on including some adaptive transmission techniques in case something goes wrong. For instance, if we want to transition from QAM to BPSK, we may want to send the transition command over something like a KA channel in order to assure that the satellite understands our requests. This channel can also be used in an emergency, assuring we can always communicate with the satellite.

The antenna on the satellite will be a Steerable Beam antenna. This is necessary since it will need to communicate with various collections stations on different parts of the earth. The ground hardware does not need these same capabilities since the satellite will be Geostationary and can be manually pointed in the proper direction.