The excel sheet below highlights the approximate costs of the parts used for the proposed system.

An additional consideration will be the cost of the digital subsystems. It will be especially important that the satellite implement a radiation hardened FPGA for in-flight reconfiguration of baseband hardware given the experimental nature of this mission. However, as the configuration is stored in SRAM, the FPGA is especially sensitive to single event upsets, requiring some additional VHDL logic redundancy in the system.

ATMEL Rad-Hard FPGA

One drawback of millimeter wave communications is the expense of the electronics that must be used for these systems. It can be seen from the budget spreadsheet that the total cost of the electronics for the transponder system will total $100,629.00. This does not include the cost of the ground station antenna, as it will most likely have to be custom made. Certain components, such as the orthomode transducer, were substantially more expensive at the 75GHz center frequency as opposed to lower frequencies. The labor cost was determined by estimating that 5 engineers working 40 hours/day for 8 working months would be able to complete the project, with an average pay rate of $100/hour. The total cost of the design project for Phases I-II is $820,629.00, which is acceptable since the overall project budget is $2-3 million.