It had to happen.
As soon as people realised Oscar 100, the geosynchronous satellite, worked then commercial gear started to become available. Kuhne is selling a 20W upconverter from 2m to 13cm (they will soon be selling a 3cm LNB) and another German company is selling a dual frequency dish feed. It would not surprise me if ICOM introduced the IC9700A with Oscar 100 capability built-in. It only needs a 13cm upconverter and a 10GHz downconverter. So, for under £3k the well healed commercial buying amateur can be guaranteed 24/7 DX with a small fixed dish. No towers, day and night, easy.
It has to happen. I can see ICOM and Yaesu beavering away to see who will be first. Watch this space at Dayton. I expect there will be heavily guarded prototypes got ready just in time with people busy in their labs in fear of their futures should they fail.
2 Mar 2019
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It can be done cheaper than that.
But, rather than expecting individuals to each spend thousands, all that is needed is for a club/society to raise the money for *one* unit. Then it can be connected to an existing wide-coverage 2M FM repeater to allow many people access to the satellite using gear that they already have. Audio from the repeater is fed into the satellite ground station and transmitted as SSB. Operators would be limited to one frequency on the bird, of course, but others in the hemisphere would be drawn to that frequency to have QSOs.
Alternately, enterprising individuals could set up a ground station and sell access hourly. At $4/hr, 60% usage, the station would be paid off in two months easily. This model would work best in urban areas, which is precisely the demographic that's been shut out of HF.
Universities could also set up ground stations that would be publicly available to licenced users for a smaller fee and reduced hours, with a longer time for a return on the investment. Perhaps engineering students at Oxford would find this an interesting challenge, and an outreach opportunity for the institution.
In some countries, governments (local or regional) could set up a ground station for EmComm purposes, and make that station available to the licenced public for a small fee when it's not needed for emergencies.
The QO-100 has an expected lifetime of 15+ years, so it's not as if any investment will be of short-lived utility. I think that the choice of frequencies for QO-100 was ill-considered, with a "build it and they will come" mentality. The challenge for the amateur community is to get out of the "cowboy" mentality where everyone has to have their *own* rig that sits unused most of the time.
3K oh what a bargain, I think not! We could buy 300 uBITXs HF kits for this price.
The hackers have to get into this quick! Already you can use a commercial LNB for the downlink into a SDR stick, all it needs is a down converter kit to a sensible IF either at 144MHz or 28MHz.
The uplink will be a bit more price hungry for a converter from 432MHz upwards, but it was done for the likes of Oscar 13 mode L, back in those days at sensible cost.
73 Steve..
Well, there's a cheap way to go too as you can listen for the sat with a simple lnb with PLL a rtl-sdr and a small dish (I've tested down to 20cm diameter HI). Not complicated if you just want to get an idea of what's going on on the sat.
Then you can stabilize the lnb with a tcxo or a stable signal generator able to output 27MHz or 25MHz (depending on a lnb), it's not that hard either and many hams will be pleased to help.
Then to transmit there are some upconverter like the one from dxpatrol (I'm waiting for it) that are cheap and useable with a wifi booster as an amplifier. A wifi dish is supposed to do the job for the uplink.
So ok, it's not as easy as simply buying gear but not as complicated as building a transverter.
And the most important part, it's fun to build a station from such modules without an extensive electronic knowledge (If I can do it, a lot of people can HI) and it's such a reward to be able to reach space with your own gear !
73, Tom F8COD
I wonder, though, if the likes of Icom, Yaesu etc would take up the idea of a plug-and-play transceiver until such time as there is a satellite covering Japan and/or North America? Those two markets may justify the R&D costs but radios with a limited non-global market may not.
Of course, those satellites would also have to have the same uplink/downlink bands as Es’hail-Sat....
Regards,
Keith G0RQQ / VA2QU
Keith - you make a very good point!
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