El 2/9/20 a las 5:40, Daniel Schultz via AMSAT-BB escribió:
According to the IARU website description, "AMICal Sat is an educational mission which has been developed by UGA-CSUG and MSU-SINP during 30 month. It involved 50 students of different level and specialties."
One of the reasons that amateur radio still exists is that we can educate the next generation of students, and AMICal Sat seems to fulfill that mission. If it was a commercial or government mission or an academic mission without substantial student involvement, then Part 5 or whatever the European equivalent is would be more appropriate, but to grow the next generation of space scientists and satellite engineers it would seem to be a legitimate use of amateur radio frequencies.
Hi all,
Just to add a positive comment about AMICal Sat's mission. If the satellite works well and there is a good management plan from spacecraft operators, we as Amateurs could be receiving and processing aurora images taken by the satellite, and learning about digital protocols, CMOS image sensors and space weather. See
https://destevez.net/2020/03/decoding-images-from-amical-sat/
for an idea of what this can look like.
Of course this needs a lot of non-technical work of engagement between the satellite operators and the Amateur community so that a fruitful cooperation can happen. Only time will tell to what extent this will happen, but my view is already positive since that work linked above was done in collaboration with Julien F4HVX, who was collaborating with the satellite team. So we already see that this project is not completely alien to the Amateur radio community.
However, I also value and generally agree with the comments about many satellites using Amateur radio spectrum without adding any real value to the Amateur radio community. Regulatory matters aside (IARU satcoord is working really hard with this), I prefer to think positively about these as "missed chances of cooperation between the Amateur community and academia/education, or even the private sector (but take with a lot of care due to the non-profit character of Amateur radio)".
Best,
Dani.