Alphasat TDP5: Lessons learnt from AIT activities on the payload for communication and propagation experiments at Q/V band

An increasing interest is arising on the exploitation of the Q/V bands for telecommunication applications, in order to cope with the greater and greater demand of bandwidth resources. The development of a mission in the Q/V band was preliminarily investigated by Space Engineering in the framework of an Italian Space Agency (ASI) program dedicated to the Q/V-band. Afterwards, the innovative QV-band Payload - Technology Demonstration Payload (identified as TDP#5) - that will fly on the AlphaSat satellite, has been conceived as a very good occasion for the assessment of the advantages and drawbacks of these new frequency bands. TDP#5 payload has been entirely funded by ASI and developed under an ESA contract awarded to Thales Alenia Space Italia (TAS-I) and Space Engineering (SE) as co-prime contractors. At this point in time, the TDP#5 has been fully integrated at Astrium premises (Toulouse) on Alphasat satellite and successfully tested at ambient conditions. After an introduction with a brief description of TDP#5 mission and payload, this paper focuses on the AIT activities, highlighting those aspects - related to the Q/V bands utilization - that from our experience came out to be the most interesting.