I'm thinking of the young people to whom I demo satellites from time to time. The SEEDS signal is great fun to download, but, of course, it is the same static image. What if the SSTV image were a downconverted image of the earth taken from an on-board camera? I know the resolution would be terrible, but neither were the Apollo landing pictures. The immediacy of knowing that this is an image of earth from space, combined with the speed and ease of SSTV reception would be pretty neat, I think. I'd be inclined not to care about tumble, either. If this shot has no earth in it, who cares as long as the next one is likely to.
Secondly, I would love to see some real earth or oceanic science being done with cubesats. Is there someone you could collaborate with who has a question in mind on these topics that current satellites can't answer? I'd be inclined, just for the fun of it, to pose the question to the top oceanographers and imaging people. 'Hams help investigate effects of global warming' would be a pretty nice QST article :-)
Finally, keep in touch. I know it must be lots of work to let the ham community know about your work, but it will go miles in terms of good will and telemetry capture. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just cc'ing amsat-bb on some technical report emails would be fantastic. Basically, we're just a bunch of guys who would love to be in your shoes; the more you let us know about what that's like, the better. It's one of the many things the Delfi C3 guys have done right.
73, Bruce VE9QRP
On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 3:45 PM, Simon Brown (HB9DRV) simon@hb9drv.ch wrote:
My vote is for SSTV, preferably Scottie 2 format.
Simon Brown, HB9DRV
From: "Mark Vandewettering" kf6kyi@gmail.com
I'm personally interested in imaging, so I am intrigued by satellites like CUTE (which carries essentially a cell phone camera), COMPASS-1 (which carries an as-yet untried camera down link) and SEEDS (which has an SSTV downlink).
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