I hope this note finds everyone on the Eagle and Suitsat teams having a pleasant mid-November. For those in the United States, I hope you have a pleasant Thanksgiving hiatus. For the first time in months, I will have four days in a row at home!
Tomorrow I go to the intial meeting at the Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences at U. Md. for the stand up of my team and the kick off of my project. This has been the most brutal six months of my career in the dealing with bureaucrats and it has played hell with most aspects of my life. I have not stayed with Tom and Elizabeth in weeks. I have foresworn Gin and Tonic for weeks so you know it must be bad! After tomorrow's kick off and following the Thanksgiving break and the GnuRadio Hackfest (next week and now a major activity at my work place) I expect to return to "full time HAM work" with a very large agenda.
This past Friday night I spent time talking with Bob Davis and Saturday, I had a very good half a day with him at the Lab. He is just doing a great job but we have been allowing him to carry the load for us while trying to do a full time job of his own. I am hoping that more people will start to go over. AMSAT will support this activity. We are starting some fun things at the Pocomoke facility and with U. Md. E.S.
The HASP balloon project has been joined by AMSAT through Hawk/AMSAT in Pocomoke. It will give us an early opportunity to fly our Suitsat 2 payloads and we will be pushing to finish those pieces (all of them) in time to get on the balloon. This will give us the focus we need to finish the RF pieces and the experiment interfaces.
We are going to build the frame of Eagle in the lab this year.
We hope to stand up an AMSAT Institute, a two week "camp for teachers" at UMES and Hawk in the coming summer.
Bob and his volunteers have done a great job getting a lot done in the last few weeks.
http://n4hy.smugmug.com/gallery/3841264
Soon the fire systems will be in and a certificate of occupancy granted and work can begin!
Hawk has a Cubesat project. It is to be launched from Wallops on the DelMarVa peninsula next summer unless there are slips. Our labs are in the Hawk Institute for Space Sciences offices as seen in the photo's in the gallery above. There is work that needs to be done to help finish this off. I do not have a list of tasks yet but that will be coming soon. I will be doing my best to set a good example by going down there on two Friday's a month and working through most of Saturday starting in December "on my way home" from Maryland to NJ. This will be reasonably straightforward to figure out. N2HPE is off every other weekend and I will work in Md when she is working.
We can accomplish a lot in the coming months and I hope you will soon feel the enthusiasm I do for the prospects for the end of the year and also 2008.
Have a great week and Happy Thanksgiving to my U.S. friends.
Bob