[amsat-bb] Re: plethora of birds

[K8TB]

w7lrd at comcast.net wrote:

>Hello
>With the plethora of commercial satellites whizzing around, specifically the ones that are approaching their "end of life", and being replaced.  Is it at all feasable they could be "reconfigured" to accomodate "us".  We hams are pretty good at "making due" with just about anything. 
>

    As one gets older, one can't quite remember how long ago something 
happened, but I seem to think some ten-twenty years ago, there was a 
group of hams who uplinked to the band edges of the C band satellite 
birds, I think using SSB. The down link range of the C band birds  is 
3700-4200 MHz, with the uplink range of 5.925-6.425 GHz. With the 
amateur band being 5650 to 5925 MHz, one can see how a signal at 5924.9 
would probably still make it through the bandpass filters on the bird. 
Of course, RF would have to be, um, azimuth and elevation "directed"  
Interesting story, I wonder if anyone,"who knows more (!)", could fill 
us in.

tom k8tb