ThumbSat opens small satellite manufacturing facility in Tijuana

The company have partnered with MXSpace, Simple Complexity, and local and federal government agencies in Mexico to bring a modern electronics manufacturing and testing facility to one of Mexico's most exciting cities, Tijuana. Commissioning and start-up of the factory was completed at the end of March 2016, now the facility is fully operational and capable of producing circuit boards for satellites, electronic subsystems, such as radio transmission boards, customer specific payloads, including the new ThumbNet dongles, which will be one of the most advanced Software Defined Radio (SDR) receivers available anywhere in the world. The facility includes a clean room housing all of the equipment required to manufacture and assemble ThumbNet tracking stations and ThumbSat satellites as well as perform all of the required testing to ensure the satellites are ready for launch into space. Testing capabilities of the laboratory eventually will include hot and cold thermal cycling, 3 axis random and sine wave vibration, vacuum, and complete electrical and operational verification. The facility can also be used to support other researchers or students at the UTT complex. Additionally, the company partnered with local suppliers in Baja, California for materials and supports vendors, such as industrial machine work or printed circuit board manufacturing. In April of 2016, the satellite company achieved the milestone of successfully creating the first circuit boards, by producing a first run of completely populated boards of the radio transmission subsystem for the ThumbSat satellites. This is an entirely new radio circuit that has increased stability, efficiency and better transmission characteristics than the commercial circuit that was previously used on ThumbSat. Radio boards are currently in Europe, in the hands of ThumbSat's RF engineering team for extensive testing, but initial testing shows the quality and reliability of the manufactured boards are as high as expected.