[amsat-bb] Talking about satellites and AMSAT online, but not email

[Ciemon Dunville]

I've come back to the hobby and AMSAT after a many years away, and it's
great to see that the passion, interest and fun is still there. Back in
2000 when I turned the station off, email was about the only way to
communicate outside of a local club, so I'm surprised that email still
seems to be about all there is.

For someone not in a club, or not wanting to be part of a club, and without
any known fellow satellite focused operators nearby it can be a challenge
at times to find answers when Google can't help and a simple question to a
person would probably be quite quick.

I've searched back through the archive here to look for real time chat
tools such as IRC, Slack and Discord but these don't appear to have caught
on, but in the spirit of trying to fill a potential gap I've fired up a
Discord server at
https://discord.com/channels/711956593117233254/711956593117233256 Whilst
this does have a voice capability it's mainly text chat, but can have
separate channels for different topics such as antennas, tracking etc and
can have channels for countries to focus on too.

New users will need to create an account which is normal for all Discord
users, and I hope that this server might be of some use to the global AMSAT
community.

Regards,
Ciemon
G0TRT