Politech.1 is a 3U CubeSat that has been built by students at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia.

It carries an Earth Observation payload with a Geodetic Camera to take pictures and a directive C-band communications antenna for downloading these images to the ground station. For those reasons, attitude and orbit control is very important in the mission when compared to other Cubesat missions.

Politech.1 will also carry Optical Fiber sensing for temperature monitoring and a NASA experiment called WINCS, to monitor the solar wind and its effect on the ionosphere.

The expected life of Politech.1 mission is two years, taking into account that most of the components are not specifically radiation-hardened.

Politech.1 carries two dipoles, one in UHF band for downlink and other in VHF band for uplink, the tube of the telescope for an EO camera accommodating the secondary mirror, and the dual C-band patch antenna for high data rate downlink.

The solar panels are kept in the primary structure; therefore, no further elements protrude the CubeSat standard envelope. The team are proposing to use an AX25 UHF 2-FSK 1k2 downlink @ 700mW and a 5.8GHz high speed 2-FSK downlink @ 115kb.

Planning to fly on a VEGA mission to a 400/500km polar orbit.

Politech.1 (in Spanish)
http://www.agenciasinc.es/Noticias/La-Universitat-Politecnica-de-Valencia-prepara-su-primer-satelite-Politech.1

IARU Amateur Radio Satellite Frequency Coodination Pages http://www.amsat.org.uk/iaru