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

[Trevor .]

--- On Mon, 17/10/11, William Leijenaar <pe1rah at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I see these ChipSats more like RF polution and I believe
> you can better put your money and effort in designing a real
> communication satellite. 

I think it will be a great acheivement to successfully deploy sats this small and successfully receive data from them. 

I do, however, share your concerns regarding long term RF pollution. In the case of KickSat this would be mitigated by the short lifetime before re-entry of a few days and I understand the total bandwidth occupied by all the 10 milliwatt ChipSat transmitters will be under 100 kHz.

KickSat is not a problem but you can see how this technology can be built on in the future. Low cost swarms of satellitess can be a valuable scientific tool. When it moves to the commercial arena we won't want it in our bands.

The QB50 project https://www.qb50.eu/ is proposing to launch a swarm of 50 2U CubeSats, see AMSAT-UK Colloquium presentation at 
http://www.batc.tv/vod/QB50.flv 
QB50 will have a significant spectrum requirement.

I note that in the USA the NTIA is considering a paper proposing 10 MHz of UHF spectrum for small satellites, see 
http://www.uk.amsat.org/2011/10/01/new-itu-service-for-cubesats-and-nanosats/ 
Maybe that could be a solution to be problem ?

Now you could say that if there's 10 MHz of spectrum between 400-2025 MHz going spare then the Amateur and Amateur Satellite Services could do with it ;-)

The worrying thing is that some may consider our spectrum might fit the bill :-(

73 Trevor M5AKA