[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
>
>
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