On 10/15/2012 05:55 PM, Clayton Coleman wrote:
I don't agree with these elitist arguments for intentionally making things difficult. This "anti-easy-sat" mentality doesn't buy us anything. Let the dead horse decompose.
I don't think anybody actually wants to make things deliberately harder. But hams have always pushed the boundaries. Going further with less power and less bandwidth. Fooling around with useless frequencies above 1 MHz. And so forth. And the satellite operator is no different.
It may be easy to reliably work a future generation of satellites with an HT and a rubber duckie. But that won't be challenging. And we (the operators) won't be learning anything new.
Driving innovation and spawning a new generation of experimenters is a more realistic vision. Create opportunities for people to step outside their "box" and homebrew equipment. That excites people.
Which is a long way of saying "I want hard sats!" :-)