Only time will tell how this geosynchronous satellite (Es'hail2) will work out. At the moment, it seems to be working well with about 6-8 users at one time. As time goes by, I expect more people will get active on it. In the end it could get quite busy.
Will the initial enthusiasm wane? Will people soon tire of this "repeater in the sky"? OK it is 22000 miles up, but once you have worked a few stations, you know you can work just about anybody that is in range across the planet with suitable gear. At the moment it is novel to be able to work real DX with ease on microwave frequencies at any time.
At the moment I am monitoring on the web SDR. See https://eshail.batc.org.uk/nb/
Equipment is scarce right now, and pretty expensive for off-the-shelf rigs. This is a failure by manufacturers and the (supposedly) innovative minds that the hobby holds out with pride. Clubs and societies within the reach of AO-100 should be setting up ground stations and linking them to local repeaters. They've had *years* to do this. The supposedly brightest minds in the hobby have essentially just yawned at this exciting development, waiting for the buzz to die down so we can go back to doing things the same way they were done in the 1950's.
ReplyDeleteTo me, it presents a challenge to the most fundamental 'appeals' of HF.
- "HF lets you talk to people far away" -- well, you can reach a satellite 22k miles away in space with a few watts, and reach an entire hemisphere without worrying about band openings or solar cycles.
- "HF takes skill" -- and putting a microwave station together is something a child can do? It uses the same modes as HF on the linear transponder, too. And FT8 doesn't require much "skill" at all.
- "something something magic of RF" -- reaching a satellite in space isn't any less 'magical' than bouncing a signal off the ionosphere. One is just more reliable than the other option.
The underlying challenge is that geo-sync satcom removes the need for large lots with big antennae to actually *talk* to people -- as opposed to 'making contacts' on modes like FT8.
Now the amateur community has to seriously address the question: "Is the hobby about technology and communication, or is really just about 'tradition' and locking in the past?".
If geo-sync satcom *does* fail to catch on, it's more of an indictment of the hobby's backward-looking mentality than it is an indictment of satcom itself, imo.
I think this is a great advancement in amateur radio, and it will be interesting to see how popular it is over time. With 9mhz of bandwidth there is a lot of room. One thing to consider is that with the websdr you could start with just the transmit side to reduce equipment costs.
ReplyDelete