On Sat, 2009-07-04 at 09:13 -0400, Jeff Davis wrote:
I recall reading something from G0RMF about adapting a CubeSat to include some sort of a propulsion system to get to a mid-Earth orbit:
I have no idea if this is viable, but it seems to me that if we want to place assets higher than LEO these are the kinds of ideas we should be kicking around on the BB and perhaps leave the moon base installation ideas for AMSAT members in 2050 to figure out how to make work and to fund.
I do see one snag with that article. The author talks about reducing transponder bandwidth to increase the transmit power, which is fair enough - that 13dB has to come from somewhere. However, because the footprint is correspondingly larger there will be much more contention for bandwidth because more people will be attempting to use it.
Of course, the increased complexity of the ground station will put some people off, so perhaps not as many people will be capable of hitting the MEO satellite. Furthermore, if it was used for narrow band modes like CW and PSK, 50kHz might well be perfectly adequate.
I could be completely wrong, though.
Gordon 2M0YEQ