Hello Andre,
Has anyone ever considered piggybacking on a geosat in a simular way the rs11 to 13 did? Sure you would need a very good lobbyist to get a ride with a multi milion dollar broadcast sat and it would only see one continent but it will give that continent 24/7 coverage, using 3 cm as downlink it would give pleny bandwith for all kinds of experiments and if you can use the host sat's powerbus there would also be no power restrictions.
Yeah, we still have dreams! At various times it had been called AMSAT-Eagle, Phase IV Lite, C-C Rider, and other things. You'll notice from the dates on these papers how long we've had this dream of a millions dollar rideshare with a millions dollar satellite ...
http://www.arrl.org/news/amsat-announces-plans-for-2008 http://home.comcast.net/~k9jkm/Education_AMSAT_Eagle.pdf http://home.comcast.net/~k9jkm/CQVHF_Eagle_ACP_Emcomm.pdf
Microwave downlinks were initially proposed here ... http://www.cnssys.com/files/amsat/cc_amsat.pdf http://www.cnssys.com/files/amsat/cc-revisited.pdf http://www.cnssys.com/files/amsat/SDX_and_Future_AMSAT_Missions.pdf
-- 73 de JoAnne K9JKM k9jkm@amsat.org