This depends on who the satellite host is. QO-100 is hosted on a United Arab Emirates satellite bus and it benefits from the royal patronage of the UAE monarchy. One of the royal princes sits on the country's communications authority and has a personal interest in amateur radio. A royal monarchy has a great deal of flexibility in spending money and is not accountable to stockholders.
Space-X is an American company with an eye that is always on the bottom line. They probably would not respond well to a request for free satellite resources for a non revenue payload. It is not as if AMSAT has not already approached them about getting a launch, but their response to date is some version of we can buy a launch at market price but nobody rides for free. Maybe you would have better luck with one of the other LEO companies, but how do you make a case to a company's board and stockholders to give away valuable payload space for free?
Dan Schultz N8FGV
------ Original Message ------ Received: Thu, 06 Oct 2022 02:42:52 PM EDT From: Jean Marc Momple jean.marc.momple@gmail.com To: AMSAT BB amsat-bb@amsat.org Subject: [AMSAT-BB] Just an idea - LEO FM birds
Dear All,
As FM birds seems to be very popular I believe that we may have a chance to
deliver and improve this service to the community without much cost, as follows:
There are many commercial LEO constellations being implemented, the biggest
is probably space-x Starlink but for our purpose there are many others.
If we copy with pride the QO-100 example/concept in the GEO sphere which is
to piggyback on commercial missions to have a transponder on board. thus using just simple FM repeaters (analog/no TLM or intelligence) using the main mission PSU we can have also our own constellation to enable huge coverage.
Just an idea which I wanted to share hoping it will eventually trigger a
project.
73
Jean Marc (3B8DU)