[Ground-station] Ballon launch - lightweight inexpensive 10GHz transmit

[Phil Karn]

On 5/14/18 15:21, Zach Leffke via Ground-Station wrote:
> Quick reply....haven't ingested everything yet.
> 
> For Transmit, 10 GHz: (not practical for balloon due to weight/cooling,
> but maybe as a reference, or at least inspiration)

Is this inherent to the design? There's no way to build a smaller and
lighter version of the transmitter? What's the mass?

> I'd be very interested in how the phasing of multiple LNBs plays out. 

I'm not up on what you/they are trying to do here, but are you
considering locking all of the converters to a common frequency source
and processing each feed independently with a SDR to do software beam
forming and steering?

I think this is the next major step for ham radio now that basic SDR
technology has become widespread. I've been thinking of doing it on HF
since even large directional HF antennas have relatively few elements
compared to, say, 70cm. But if we can do it on X band, great.

73, Phil