I looked into CubeSats in a previous job. Basically, there are four parts:

• What’s the purpose?
• How to design and build one?
• How to launch it?
• How to collect the data?

Part 1: this is the back of the napkin sketch. What are you trying to do? Weather, water, fire, or air data? Imaging? Has anyone already done this? What’s the plan?

Part 2: you can DIY the whole thing, starting with the CalPoly CubeSat workshops: https://www.cubesat.org/. They’re the folks that started the whole thing.

There are also kits and services out there. One example is Pumpkin: https://www.pumpkinspace.com/, but there are a lot of others like it out there. You want to figure out what sensors you need, mechanisms to orient the sensors, radios, power management, etc. Also, what’s the lifespan before it descends into the atmosphere and burns out.

Part 3: The big problem is launch. You need to eventually get it up into space. There are commercial services, but you’re looking at $10K-$50K and up to get into the queue. Another option is to go through NASA’s Launch Intitiative: https://www.nasa.gov/kennedy/launch-services-program/cubesat-launch-initiative/ or ESA’s Fly Your Satellite program: https://www.esa.int/Education/CubeSats_-_Fly_Your_Satellite

These require being part of a non-profit or educational institution. And the waiting list is long. Like, years.

Part 4: OK, now that you got it up in space, what do you do with the data? It’s circling the globe and there’s a narrow window where the radio can connect to an earth station, send the data, and maybe receive instructions like where to point the sensors. Forget about OTA. You won’t have a large enough connection window or bandwidth to do that.

You can roll your own comms, or you can see about using an existing service, like AWS Ground Station: https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/. Microsoft had a similar service called Azure Orbital, but they retired it last year.

After all is said and done, you now have some cool data. You’ll want to process it and use it for something. This goes back to step 1. Figure out what’s the purpose, what you want to get out of it, and work backward. You can use the AWS service, pipe it into an S3 bucket or store it in a database, then run analytics and visualizations on it. If you want realtime, it’ll cost extra.

It won’t be cheap, but it will likely be a lot of fun. I proposed several projects in a past life. We got pretty far, but the launch window was years away and by then I was heading out. All this is an infodump of what I learned back then. Hope this helps.

Space RF communication protocols and best-use technologies - I need to read about it more

You can get a decent primer on this topic here and here. If you aren’t already a licensed ham, you can look into getting your Technician license (a lofty goal, given the exam comprises thirty whole multiple-choice questions, assuming you’re in the U.S.) and get familiar with transmitting/receiving across long distances.

One fun experiment you can tackle early on before even getting licensed to transmit is to just receive signals from satellites that are already in orbit and can be reliably tracked. For example: you can easily track the International Space Station and know when it will be passing over your location and set up a receiver to listen on the right frequency. It’s not uncommon for them to be broadcasting some kind of signal on a regular basis. Sometimes they even broadcast SSTV signals that you can receive and decode. Once you’ve done this a couple of times, you oughta be pretty comfortable with at least receiving signals from satellites in orbit. Good preliminary proof of concept.

A couple of handy web apps I’ve used to track satellites before:

• https://in-the-sky.org/satmap_radar.php
• https://www.n2yo.com/satellites/?c=18
• https://www.heavens-above.com/

You used to be able to track the ISS through a NASA web app, but they recently retired it in favor of their first-party app 🙄. Admittedly, it’s a pretty great app in my experience. But I wish the old web app were still online. That said, the apps I linked above should also be able to track the ISS as well.

Check out this project. But your first requirement of a camera pointing to earth isn’t realistic for a small cube satellite.

I seem to recall reading once that the launch cost was down to $10,000 for a cubesat now.

Start by joining amsat.org I guess.

AWS has some kind of ground station service. I imagine it’s expensive though