High speed (≥1Ghz) and long distance (≥100km) data communication among CubeSats and NanoSats can accelerate the technology advancement and paves the way for critical applications such as formation flying and remote sensing. Design of a simple, lightweight optical transceiver with full duplex capability, fast-tracking speed and 360° field of regard for CubeSat is crucial due to extreme SWaP-C limitations. In this paper, we describe the design tradeoff between the field of view and collection efficiency in receiver design using Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) optics and detectors. We also briefly discussed the design tradeoffs in transmitter design for optimum performance. We show that to achieve maximum SNR at long distance(≥100km), the laser beam diameter needs to be 80%-90% of the scanning mirror diameter. In addition to that, we show that the intrinsic Field of View (FOV) of high speed(≥600MHz) Avalanche Photodiodes (APD) can be increased to ≥3° by incorporating optimized optics considering form factor of the CubeSat system. In addition, we present a scalable detector array design method using COTS components to achieve a wide full FOV(≥12°) with a uniform collection efficiency around 30%-60%. Furthermore, we demonstrated a multi-wavelength full duplex communication system based on dichroic filters as duplexer that shows significantly low crosstalk. The system also exhibits low transmission power loss(≤4%) as opposed to around 40% that of the conventional beam splitter based system.
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