Satellite Licensing
Overview
According to SatNOGS wiki, a cube satellite can either looking for an amateur or non-amateur radio license. This gives the following path of licensing our satellite:
Purely operating in amateur radio band: start by contacting IARU
Purely operation by experimental license: start by contacting FCC
Both
Amateur Band Operation
Notice that amateur radio is targeting for completely non-commercial projects. Since we plan to receive external fundings from companies, we might not be eligible to use the amateur band as our main operation band due to the FCC code.
License Requirement for Operator
One need a license to be legally transmit on amateur radio band (Technician class or above).
(Not for legal advice) Receiving only, however, shouldn’t be a issue.
(Not for legal advice) Before we officially obtained proper license for our mission, it should be fine to testing the transceiver hardware under amateur radio band following procedures of amateur radio operation.
Band allocation
For small satellite, we primarily focus on operating the following frequencies:
At 2-meters band, 144.1 MHz to 148.0 MHz for phone (audio), image, RTTY, and data. 144.0 MHz to 144.1 MHz for CW (Morse code).
At 60-centimeters band, 420.0 MHz to 450.0 Mhz for phone (audio), image, RTTY, and data.
Specially, FCC allocates 144–146 MHz and 435–438 MHz for space telecommand station (According to 47 CFR § 97.211).
IARU Regulations
This page https://www.iaru.org/reference/satellites/ includes a lot of information we need.
Experimental License
FCC Regulation
Follow the procedures written in 47 CFR Part 5