At 12:47 AM 9/7/2012, Thomas Doyle wrote:

Hi -

Thanks so much for your post. Many of us have been in this so long we have completely lost touch with the needs of the new ham. You have described the greatest needs in the sat hobby. Unfortunately we are heading in a direction where we are suppose to create materials to educate high school youth when we do not have even basic materials to educate our own new sat users. Many old timers will say there is lots of material out there and there is but it is very basic. There are hundreds of great videos showing how to wave an Arrow antenna around and make a contact but beyond that - not much. Unfortunately the learning curve gets very steep very fast. Thanks again for taking the time to share your insights. We need someone like you on the board.

As someone who has written an introductory article or two myself, I am inclined to agree. There is a lot of material that shows how easy it is to work your first satellite, but not a lot of "where to go from here". What would be nice is a tutorial which starts at working your first FM sat with a HT and portable antenna, then goes through from there in stages right through to fully automated stations capable of working a future HEO or fully automated operation on pacsats, among other things.

73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL http://vkradio.com