Motivation: To help facilitate the operations of manned orbital spacecraft and increase communication and telemetry coverage. The distributed nature of hackerspaces make them good candidates to increase the opportunities of ground-station contact with orbiting spacecraft.
Ideas:
- Approach hackerspaces that meet minimum requirements to help Mach 30
- Compile an instructions kit and directions for setting up a remote ground tracking station
- “Employ” thier help with the tracking and communications for orbital operations.
Needs: sky visibility, roadio communication, spacecraft telemetry tracking
Greg,
We should also look into working with Ham Radio operators. There are already one or two Ham Radio satellites, and Ham operators routinely talk to ISS and Shuttle crews from their own stations.
-J
This is another good pool of potential help from which to draw.
I still want to make sure that all “official” Aurora telemetry stations (or whatever we call them) were properly equipped with the required tracking and data relay equipment in addition to the communication capability. I know it will be fun to talk to the orbiting crew, but in this post I’m thinking of the actual TT&C functionality. Any HAM operator who is interested in setting up a ground station could provide a great benefit especially if it is in one of the less populated areas of the globe. I just thought this effort was more likely to be done by a group like a hackerspace community rather than a single HAM radio operator. It never hurts to ask though, good call.