Bob:
While you are looking at the plans for what we need to accomplish in 2008, I think that in the RF area we should include a physical modeling of at least the key parts of Tom Clark's suggested phased array antenna. We need to prove the principle. We will need the RF amplifiers and distributed gain aspects of this antenna to meet our orbital RF power and directivity goals. This then demands the creation of some real hardware - getting us past the heise luft part of the design into something that can point us to what the all-up, on-orbit hardware should look like.
If this line is not examined, we then need to have a proposal for what we should pursue..... Tom's proposal seems like a reasonable starting point. Such an project will require the efforts of a multi-technology team.
'73, Dick Jansson, KD1K mailto:[email protected] [email protected] mailto:[email protected] [email protected]