All, As most of you know me, I am one of the voices in the crowd within satellite circles and have been accused of having my own agenda. I am a fixture at many hamfests here in the New Jersey Area and wherever I can present to the Amateur community the aspects of satellite activity and promote AMSAT's proliferation. I give many talks and dog and pony shows to various clubs. My motto is "I work for donations!" I am glad this thread was ongoing since I come across this type of thinking all the time. It's a good discussion since AMSAT membership is declining and Satellite enthusiasm is dwindling, so I read.
While this area of insuring plans for HEO and MEO birds is one of my pet projects, AMSAT itself has re-addressed itself to LEO activities because of financial reaches that present launches are out of the normal (?) abilities of AMSAT to obtain. My many unscientific polls as to why hams are not rejoining AMSAT nor assisting future funding shows that they think we have to put up HEO or MEO birds to attract them back into the fold. Of course this doesn't make sense and it doesn't add to our present coffers to even think about these type of birds. Yes, it costs money to do these things.
In the past, there were negotiations behind the scenes with a GEO-Sync satellite company to add our payload to one of these birds. Company was sold, contacts were lost and so went that avenue. As with an AO-40 type satellite, we had numerous items made by our supporting volunteers and many, many, many volunteer hours to see that satellite came to fruition. Volunteers even gave up precious vacation time to work on this project. A minimal cost launch by Arianne certainly provided a great opportunity. Some of our people went by the wayside since then and we lost engineering staff to fall back on.
As Dan, N8FGV, points out to us all is that our dreams are still there. We need to reactivate those spirits as he indicates. One person stated, "I am willing to ante up $4000-I need to convince 4,999 of my friends to do the same." We are all Amateurs in this satellite area and as pioneers in Ham Radio, we must reinvent ourselves to continue to be prominent in building sats with real actual launches rooted out where we can. We have dedicated people now in active building projects for slots available for launch. My hat is off to them and I will always support their efforts. Having functioning packages on the ready is a big plus- Look at ARISsat-1 and that was a super job by "OUR" staff to step up and act before the deadline. (We don't need no stinkin' UHF antenna!) (OOPS?)
Dan provides us with answers to all these questions of why and why not. Read his input as well and I think this thread needs the answer of how much is the Amateur community willing to contribute to keep these higher orbiting satellite ideas alive. Anyone have a "RICH" uncle to donate something to this superfund? I think that we need a spark - incentive - or a benefactor to step up to get us on the launch pad at the right spot. Lottery tickets seem to be the American dream (HI, HI). Please feel free to "thank" our many sincere volunteers that keep publications coming, transponders appearing, protecting frequency allocations, monitoring rule proposals, Symposiums happening and informational updates accurate. 73, Dee, NB2F NJ AMSAT Coordinator
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Daniel Schultz Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2011 2:03 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [amsat-bb] Re: Geostationary Satellites
It is true that a Geo bird would only cover 1/3 of the Earth, but it would ALWAYS be there, with no need for antenna rotors or keps or a computer for tracking. It would be like picking up a telephone. It would be wonderful for emergency service in a disaster area. It could provide high speed digital communications on the amateur microwave bands in places where the internet is not available.
Geosynchronous orbit slots are allocated by transponder frequency. On the amateur radio bands we are free to locate a satellite anywhere we can get to because we don't share our frequencies with commercial transponders.
The reason we don't have any high altitude satellites is all about the money. We amateurs created the small satellite business. Back in the old days the big boys laughed at our cute little toy satellites, but they did allow us to bolt them to a launch vehicle for free or for very low cost. The experts were certain that our homebrew satellites wouldn't last a week without expensive mil-spec electronic components. We amateurs proved that small satellites were useful and thus created a market that we are now priced out of. The launches that used to be free can now be sold to paying customers for millions of dollars. Many of the companies in the small satellite business were founded by Amsat alumni.
We amateurs are a non-commercial service, by law, with no product or service that we can sell to raise the $10 million that we would need to buy the sort of launch that we once got for very cheap. We cannot participate in the market economy because the law prohibits us from making money from our activity, which puts us at a huge disadvantage in competing for launches against those satellite owners who can make money. If future access to space is going to be limited to those with a good business plan then we might as well pack it in as satellite builders. The educational-industrial complex has no place for "amateurs" working alone in their basements and garages without any sort of formal academic plan and no supervision by management.
Nobody in the commercial or government world cares if we can talk to Japan or Europe on amateur satellites or collect rare grid squares. It is all about education, which I am all in favor of except that I question if there really is such a crying shortage of engineers in the world. The students building their little Cubesats are going to find out someday that working for Lockheed Martin or Boeing or NASA is a far, far different world than their experience in building Cubesats.
The Cubesats are a useless diversion but are popular with the powers that be because they allow young college students to build a satellite and deliver it to the launch pad. They are too small to carry the type of payload that we need to do effective communications in a high altitude orbit. The students and their sponsors don't care if the satellite actually works on orbit because they will have graduated by the time it is launched. They recognize that the world wide network of hams is a valuable resource for tracking and telemetry collection, but they use amateur radio frequencies without giving back anything to support the basis and purpose of amateur radio.
If we are ever again going to have high altitude satellites for world wide DX and supporting high rate digital communications on our amateur microwave bands we will need to find clever ways to get larger satellites such as Eagle into higher orbits.
We also screwed up with the failure of AO-40. We could have had 10,000 or more Amsat members right now if that satellite had worked as designed. Even if we could raise the bucks to build another one, there is no chance of getting another Ariane 5 launch. Amsat-DL has not been able to find any launch for the smaller Phase 3E satellite for any amount of money that we can think about paying.
The way we did things two decades ago is not how we are going to do things now. Maybe we will never again have an Amsat-designed and built satellite but perhaps we can place a transponder on someone else's satellite in return for some sort of added value to them. There is money available for education support, maybe we can get some of it if we appeal to the right people. Maybe we can carry science experiments for NASA or some other agency if we provide operations support with telemetry and command. Maybe we can tap the same funding sources that the Google lunar competitors are getting. I don't have the answers, except that we will need to be just as clever as our predecessors were 50 years ago if we are ever going to have high altitude, high performance amateur satellites in our future.
Dan Schultz, N8FGV
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