Def: MEP = Microwave Experimentation Project
One of the stated intentions of MEP is to continue the digital ground station work that was begun in support of ACP. While MEP is intended to be deployed as a terrestrial system, the model is based off of ACP.
For what it's worth... the issue of high-gain antenna pointing among terrestrial users is being taken care of with an APRS packet that will indicate to everyone on the net, where each person's microwave antenna is pointing live. This can allow for automatic antenna tracking during terrestrial ops. See http://www.aprs.org/info/microwave-exp-proj.txt
We preserve the idea of a multiple access payload in the "groundsat", which will be a mountaintop repeater instead of in orbit. We are using the same bands, with the only difference being a shift off the satellite sub-bands. We have taken advantage of a greatly improved link budget by orienting the system to high-definition video for terrestrial
use.
For satellite use, we would be able to support some number of voice channels, depending on the payload.
We are open invitation and welcome anyone at any level who would like to participate.
Our current phase is exploratory. We're beginning to transition to analyzing requirements, and then we'll design, implement, test and verify. -Michelle W5NYV