[amsat-bb] Re: KickSat - a personal spacecraft of your own in space

[Bill Ress]

Aaah Trevor, you raise another important issue!

It is the convention (I can't cite the international rules here) that 
all communication/telemetry satellites have the ability to be commanded 
off. Clearly the Sprites don't presently have that capability.

Additionally, I don't believe that just because they are in the 
unlicensed bands, that they would be permitted to use those bands in 
space. But I'm not clear here. Perhaps an experimental license could be 
granted to operate in space by our FCC but that would only be good over 
the US. Again the command/control issue comes into play.

I have had several emails with Zac and he's very receptive to getting 
our comments. I also encouraged him to forge ahead while trying to 
understand some of these sticky issues. His concept surely would push 
the envelope of current Amateur communications and satellite "art" and 
that's worthy of this efforts.

What will be interesting is the reported 10 mw telemetry beacon being 
used by SRMSAT, since that's the EIRP the Sprite is planning to have. So 
a "real" test at that power level is eminent. Good luck on the launch!!!

Regards...Bill - N6GHz

On 10/10/2011 3:07 PM, Trevor . wrote:
> --- On Mon, 10/10/11, Tony Langdon<vk3jed at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Still seems a strange choice of frequency, given that GSM
>> phones use these frequencies in many parts of the world.
>
> ITU Region 1 seems to be moving closer to permitting unlicensed low power use, RFID etc, around 915-921 MHz  but as you say the rest is mobile phones.
>
> Given there is no mechanism to command these Sprite ChipSats so they are only on over the USA the use of 902 MHz would seem inapropriate.
>
> 73 Trevor M5AKA
>
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