Daniel,
I can agree with your reasoning but if we don’t try hard enough and even before trying find reasons (valid or not) not to try we will never succeed. My personal view is that without trying the ANSWER IS “NO” but if you try hard enough it can be a “YES”, so I guess we should be positive and give it at least a try and not be negatively biased without even trying as it is the best way to fail.
I can understand your American point of view about corporate bottom line, but there are other possibilities such as Japan, China or India which may be more flexible (such as UAE for QO-100) which can help the worldwide HAM community which is based on friendship across borders and without interference from international politics.
Again just throwing ideas for discussions.
73
Jean Marc (3B8DU)
On Oct 7, 2022, at 12:10 AM, Daniel Schultz [email protected] wrote:
This depends on who the satellite host is. QO-100 is hosted on a United Arab Emirates satellite bus and it benefits from the royal patronage of the UAE monarchy. One of the royal princes sits on the country's communications authority and has a personal interest in amateur radio. A royal monarchy has a great deal of flexibility in spending money and is not accountable to stockholders.
Space-X is an American company with an eye that is always on the bottom line. They probably would not respond well to a request for free satellite resources for a non revenue payload. It is not as if AMSAT has not already approached them about getting a launch, but their response to date is some version of we can buy a launch at market price but nobody rides for free. Maybe you would have better luck with one of the other LEO companies, but how do you make a case to a company's board and stockholders to give away valuable payload space for free?
Dan Schultz N8FGV
------ Original Message ------ Received: Thu, 06 Oct 2022 02:42:52 PM EDT From: Jean Marc Momple [email protected] To: AMSAT BB [email protected] Subject: [AMSAT-BB] Just an idea - LEO FM birds
Dear All,
As FM birds seems to be very popular I believe that we may have a chance to
deliver and improve this service to the community without much cost, as follows:
There are many commercial LEO constellations being implemented, the biggest
is probably space-x Starlink but for our purpose there are many others.
If we copy with pride the QO-100 example/concept in the GEO sphere which is
to piggyback on commercial missions to have a transponder on board. thus using just simple FM repeaters (analog/no TLM or intelligence) using the main mission PSU we can have also our own constellation to enable huge coverage.
Just an idea which I wanted to share hoping it will eventually trigger a
project.
73
Jean Marc (3B8DU)