Hi Tom,
Your position and thoughts are well considered and well put. Please let me offer some additional insight.
- There is no government funding available to AMSAT.
There is, with restraints. The launch of Fox-1 will be provided by NASA, since it includes an educational component, and submitted to and was approved by the ELANA program.
ARISSat was also supported by NASA and the Russian space agency.
Opinion;
The AMSAT paradigm needs to change to allow the creators to get more radios into space for the communicators. Well funded organizations are building satellites with radios for telemetry and perhaps communication. One possible solution to the observations is to get out of the launch business completely and for the creators to build radios for other organizations creating satellites. These radios would include the capabilities desired by the organization and also include the desired functionality for the communicators in order to get a ride to space. In essence trade radios for rides. This would allow AMSAT to use their knowledge and resources for building space based radios.
What you have proposed here is -exactly- what the Fox program is doing. AMSAT is working with multiple groups to provide the Fox avionics in support of their experiments, which when completed (and sometimes before) will be also open to general amateur use.
An astute observer will notice almost all of the recent real amateur communications satellites have had a partnership or shared arrangement with educational or scientific missions. SO-67 was a payload on a host educational spacecraft, as was HO-68. DO-64 has a transponder as part of an educational cubesat. ARISSat had a transponder and camera system as part of an educational mission. And on and on as of late.
73, Drew KO4MA