CubeSat picosatellites have a limited area of walls for solar cells assembling and the available area has to be effectively shared with other parts, such as planar antennas, optical sensors, camera lens, and access port. With standard size of solar cell strings, it is not possible to construct a reliable solar panel for CubeSat with redundant strings interconnection. Typical solar panels for CubeSat consist of two solar cell strings serially wired with no redundancy in case of solar string failure. The loss of electric energy from one solar panel can cause a serious problem for most picosatellites due to minimum margin in the blueprints of the picosatellite subsystem power budget. In this paper, we propose a new architecture of solar panels for PilsenCUBE CubeSat with a high level of redundancy in the case of solar string failure or following switched power regulator failure. Our solar panels use a high efficiency triple junction GaInP2/GaAs/Ge in the form of small triangle strings from the Spectrolab Company. A suitable technology for precise solar cell assembling is also discussed, because CubeSat picosatellites are usually developed by small teams with limited access to high-end facilities.

This paper presents a design concept of new radio communication subsystem, intended for use on the PilsenCUBE nanosatellite. The hardware and software solution is based on previous experiences with the VZLUSAT-1 setup and operation. Our aim is to overcome weak points which were found, use modern powerful components actually available and build reliable radio for nanosatellite use. For better reliability, radiation tested components were used on critical places and complex system for diagnostics and fault protection was designed and implemented. The satellite radio communication protocol was also modified to comply with all requirements of nanosatellite operation. Satellite control data has to be secure, but significant part of experiment data need to be widely available to all ground segments on the World. This also improves the communication link capacity and reliability.

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One of the main goals of the PilsenCUBE-II picosatellite project is to offer on board payload space for the student's experiments for the students from the various secondary schools of the western Bohemia. The students experiments have to be simple enough in scope of skills and abilities of the secondary schools students but should provide interesting results for satellite project. There is 6 student's experiments in the second round of competition. This experiments will be integrated into satellite as a parts of the measurement board (MES). The measurement board will provide the interface between these student's experiments (STE) and On-Board Computer (OBC) that is controlling the functions of the satellite and providing the communication with ground station.

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