If all you want to do is "communicate" with no experimenting or technical involvement then forget amateur radio and sit at your computer and use the internet. It even now works throughout the world via easy to set up satellite links using "solid commercial gear".
Rocky Jones wrote:
Luc...I would add this.
What is firmly missing in the amateur satellite effort is something "repeatable" that encourages solid commercial gear to be available to people who want to use the sats.
Wayne Green (w2nsd who I think is still with us)...had some pretty "wild" stuff in the startup of the repeater movement...but he also had some pretty good musings about what it would take to take the repeater movement from the "techies" to "ordinary" hams... He came and spoke to us while I was in college and we had a chance to have some "one on one" and he more or less nailed what it was going to take to get the repeater movement "mainstream".
It is going to take about the same thing for hamsats...and one of those is a continued supply of hamsats which encourage more communicating and less experimenting....
Thats what is intriguing about the SpaceX "launch" campaign...and indeed about the entire changes that are occurring now with the Augustine commission there is a chance for things developing like geo synch "rafts" where very large satellite complexes etc are built. But ham radio will not in my view have a seat at that table unless and until there is some "normalcy" in the mode.
I spent part of the afternoon talking with a condo owner on Clear Lake about the Club moving its APRS/voice machine to the top of his 14 story building (a virtual skyscraper in this part of Houston)...it was amazing how fast he came around, all he could think of was what went on in Hurricane Ike.
Robert WB5MZO
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