[amsat-bb] Community Survey Request -- crosslinks, multi-hop packet, and satellite DX

Zach Leffke zleffke at vt.edu
Sun Apr 2 20:31:36 UTC 2017


one clarification point.. all opinions are good, and I'm interested in 
them.

I meant all opinions, whether positive ('Hey that's cool, I'd play') or 
negative ('stupid idea, will never work') related to the concept of 
operations, are welcome.


-Zach, KJ4QLP

Research Associate
Aerospace Systems Lab
Ted & Karyn Hume Center for National Security & Technology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
Work Phone: 540-231-4174
Cell Phone: 540-808-6305

On 4/2/2017 4:26 PM, Zach Leffke wrote:
> Hello fellow satellite nuts!
>
> This email is to humbly request the opinions of those in the Amateur 
> Satellite Community about the idea of setting new satellite DX 
> records.  Nothing formal, you can email on list or off list as you 
> think appropriate.
>
> So here is the idea:  What if there were a constellation of three 
> satellites (3 1Us), built by students (undergrads) at three different 
> universities, but launched together and deployed from the same 
> deployer that had crosslink packet communications built into the 
> design.  Then, what if those birds were licensed via the Amateur Radio 
> route (instead of Experimental as is the norm for most University 
> birds, with some notable exceptions of course) allowing the entire 
> global amateur satellite community to use the crosslink capability in 
> an attempt to set new satellite DX records?
>
> Now, there is a primary science mission (pseudo-range determination as 
> the constellation separates, different mass and drag profiles for each 
> bird) so during the work week, science happens, but on the weekends, 
> the constellation is made available to the community for crosslink 
> packet comms.  Additionally, if your setup has enough G/T to monitor 
> the lower power crosslink comms, and with a little bit of technical 
> tweaking to your ground station (you would need GPS based PPS to 
> measure propagation time, maybe ~$100 invested), you could participate 
> in Space to Earth pseudo-range measurements that would contribute to a 
> secondary orbit determination goal.  To be clear, the up and down 
> linking for the satellite DX attempts would be standard FSK9600, 
> AX.25, so as long as your station can do that, you can use the 
> crosslink path for multi-hop comms.  Its only the S-to-E pseudo range 
> measurement that would require a bit of additional HW.
>
>
> Does this sound interesting?  Would you as an operator be interested 
> in multi-hop satellite packet comms?  Do you think this type of 
> operating schedule is acceptable (weekends) to justify Amateur Radio 
> licensing instead of Experimental?  Would you be interested in 
> contributing to the science mission (S-to-E pseudo-range 
> measurement)?  Would you track the telemetry downlinks and forward 
> that data on to the mission data warehouse?
>
>
> Any and all opinions, good or bad, are welcome.  Again, on or off list 
> as you see appropriate is fine with me.  My goal with this is to get a 
> sense of what the community's opinion on this topic is and if the 
> constellation were available for use, how much interest there would be 
> in this type of operation.
>
>
> Thanks in Advance!
>
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Zach, KJ4QLP
>
>



More information about the AMSAT-BB mailing list