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Swarm Technologies was a startup that in 2020 launched tiny cube sats to provide worldwide data service for low-power IoT devices. Sadly, they got bought by Space X in 2021 and are now winding down their service. (and yes, this indeed looks like they used metal measuring tape as antennas)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_Technologies

An interesting aspect of Swarm is, that their modems use #LORA for communication with the satellites. So it was no surprise to find a Semtech SX1278 radio SoC in this teardown.
https://www.semtech.com/company/press/semtech-and-swarm-deliver-satellite-communications-with-lora

Most of the real estate on the circuit board is taken up by the RF frontend, mostly filtering, amplification and impedance matching. The RX and TX path are separate, with an IC near the antenna switching between them. There's also a GNSS SoC from U-Blox on the top left with its own antenna connection.

I sniffed the SPI pins of the SX1278 in the hopes to find some secret sauce, like a custom firmware patch. However it's all read/writes to registers documented in the datasheet.
It looks like the down-link frequency of the Swarm network is 137.86MHz.
https://gist.github.com/astuder/0790a04b7b5a22c8223508fc41222348