Thanks Dani,
A big thumbs up!!
From my experience, it is really rewarding in working with these universities and students, many of them are in the process of becoming licensed radio amateurs or are already.
They are eager and open minded and by supporting them and letting them experience the community we will have space industrie ambassadors for the future.
And for those small groups that don't want to comply to the official and gentlemen agreements we should confront them and send them to the right authorities.
On 02-09-2020 18:39, Daniel Estévez via AMSAT-BB wrote:
Hi all,
Just to add a positive comment about AMICal Sat's mission. If the satellite works well and there is a good management plan from spacecraft operators, we as Amateurs could be receiving and processing aurora images taken by the satellite, and learning about digital protocols, CMOS image sensors and space weather. See
https://destevez.net/2020/03/decoding-images-from-amical-sat/
for an idea of what this can look like.
Of course this needs a lot of non-technical work of engagement between the satellite operators and the Amateur community so that a fruitful cooperation can happen. Only time will tell to what extent this will happen, but my view is already positive since that work linked above was done in collaboration with Julien F4HVX, who was collaborating with the satellite team. So we already see that this project is not completely alien to the Amateur radio community.
However, I also value and generally agree with the comments about many satellites using Amateur radio spectrum without adding any real value to the Amateur radio community. Regulatory matters aside (IARU satcoord is working really hard with this), I prefer to think positively about these as "missed chances of cooperation between the Amateur community and academia/education, or even the private sector (but take with a lot of care due to the non-profit character of Amateur radio)".
Best,
Dani.
Jan