Advances in deep space radios

In meeting the needs of a number of different missions, JHU/APL's Space Exploration Sector RF Engineering Group has produced a family of high-reliability, extremely low size, weight, and power (SWaP) software-defined radio (SDR) products for near and deep space applications called Frontier Radio (FR) [1]. With flight heritage on multiple successful missions, the latest flight version includes a Ka-band downlink. Frontier Radio has also branched to include Frontier Radio Lite (FR Lite) [2], a single-board radio with significant SWaP savings, and the Frontier Radio Virtual Radio (VR) with the capability to replace the processing functionality of an entire spacecraft bus for smallsat, microsat, and cubesat applications. All FR products are designed for agile adaptability through the use of modular architecture in hardware, firmware, and software to meet varying needs across many missions.