Personally for me, just imagining the reward of putting together a station required for this would be huge. It is not as trivial as buying an Arrow antenna for your HT, even if you don't have to worry about doppler, or tracking it.
Even if someone makes a ready built station they are still going to have to learn about the sat, aiming the antennas right, etc. It will probably be expensive too. I doubt it will interest most hams.
I imagine all kinds of new ham culture/community will emerge on a tranponder that is available 24/7.
Maybe it will get more people into sats too. All hams will hear about it and I bet many will see the stations of the one or two hams in their area who have stations for it and learn and get excited about sats in general.
73, John Brier KG4AKV
On Sat, Nov 17, 2018, 18:46 JoAnne K9JKM <joanne.k9jkm@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Bob,
Yes once established one can “work” lots of dx somewhat analogous to a phone call.
I'd guess that "DX Phone Call" would use up about 3 KHz of a 10 MHz pipe. How about full-duplex DVB-S video QSOs ... a box to receive that mode is about $30 on AliBaba's emporiums.
All that bandwidth is looking for real-time or recorded amateur radio services. Weekly video nets ... all those ham youtube videos ... we could do a weekly ham radio cooking show like "JoAnne's Half Baked Ideas" ... you get the idea.
A portable GEO satellite terminal in a disaster zone with video and enough bandwidth to deliver internet protocol services to the responders would be priceless.
We could go nuts!
-- 73 de JoAnne K9JKM k9jkm@amsat.org
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author, and do not reflect the official views of AMSAT-NA. Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program! Subscription settings: http://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb