Thanks JoAnne. I'm sure it's a great team. What's troubling is that the fullscale development effort will take a great deal of time. I had assumed, obviously incorrectly, that the development process was much further along than it appears to be. It may not be possible to project critical dates so early in the process, but the Cubs may show up in the World Series before this transponder is done--and I don't mean this year!

What would be the impact on the completion date for Eagle (and the Intelsat transponder) if this ambitious piece of work was aimed instead at the following HEO? If our membership had some dates there could be an informed discussion of the options. There has been a lot of enthusiasm for a 5.6Ghz groundbreaking transponder, but its cost, in terms both of dollars AND TIME, must be considered as well. Will the development of this transponder delay our HEO beyond what is acceptable or not?

As planned, can anything be produced ready to launch within 5 years? What's the outlook?

73, Tony, N2UN

[Original Message] From: JoAnne Maenpaa k9jkm@comcast.net To: tjjapha@earthlink.net; amsat-bb amsat-bb@AMSAT.Org Date: 6/18/2008 7:59:52 PM Subject: RE: [amsat-bb] Eagle?

Hello Tony,

...

By the way, the writeup currently on the Amsat home page mentions ACP with a 3.4 Ghz (sic) downlink. Just a misprint? The nice Eagle flyer shows both up- and downlink on 5.6 Ghz.

Perhaps these links will reveal the current system configuration:

Summary description of the microwave utilization: http://www.delmarnorth.com/namaste/Namaste_Overview_Microwave.pdf

Project Namaste general information: http://www.amsat.org/namaste (this link is also mentioned in the ACP

article

on the AMSAT home page.)

Hope this helps!

73 de JoAnne K9JKM k9jkm@amsat.org