At the moment, there are several amateur radio satellites that are in orbit. And no, it's not because there were a few very wealthy ham radio operators who decided to launch their own satellites. Just a ride into space, specifically to launch a satellite, costs about $5million - $10million. What they've done is raised just enough money to piggy-back on a few NASA launches. And they built these satellites themselves. Some of them are smaller than a soccer ball.
"Then"
The biggest problem with the satellites, is that they didn't stay in one spot. All of them orbited around the Earth, meaning that if you stood out in your yard and could see the satellite, it would rise like the sun, fly over your head, and set behind you. This process would take about 8 - 10 minutes. That's not enough time for a conversation. And indeed, once you listen in to the satellite, you hear hundreds of people doing little more than conducting radio checks for their log books.
This was "sad and pathetic", I thought. You would have to achieve an entirely new level of nerdiness for this to be fascinating.
Then there are the technical complications. Because the satellite is moving, you have to correct for the Doppler effect. Imagine standing on the side of the road, and a fire truck comes screaming past you. The change in pitch (from high to low) of the siren, is due to this effect. For radio, this means that the frequency is slowly decreasing as the satellite travels away from you. Unless you are changing your frequency ever so slightly, every second, you get to hear the satellite for 1 or 2 seconds, and then it's gone. (These satellites usually had a 2 meter uplink, and a 440 downlink).
As you can imagine, in recent times, these people have developed computer programs which interface with servos on a satellite dish, and with a ham radio, which will do all of this automatically. Still though, your window is short, and getting your call sign in a log book just wasn't enticing enough to get me in on it.
"Now"
For the first time, we're about to have a geosynchronous satellite above the USA. It will stay in the same spot in the sky, forever. This changes the entire game, completely. They're expecting the launch to happen around the end of this year, or sometime next year. This means satellite access, 24/7/365! It also means there's no Doppler to correct for - none of the complications as described above. Oh, and here's the best part:
It's not your standard simple "repeater" either. The first thing I thought about was that it would packed full of people trying to use it, all the time, making it virtually unusable. This satellite, however, will be able to handle roughly 1,000 different conversations, simultaneously. Don't ask me how they pulled that off, because frankly, I just don't know how that works. Yet.
Here's what I can tell you about it, though:
Unlike all of the other ham radio satellites, this one is not an individual unit. It's going to be built-in to an Air Force satellite. That means it will have access to a very expensive solar array and power system. Gone are the days of weak satellite signals. Well, kinda.
The "bad news" is, unlike the other "Near Earth Orbit" amateur radio satellites, this one is going to be far away, because that's where we keep our geosynchronous satellites. Because it's going to be much farther away from Earth, now we're talking about different frequency bands. Whereas the existing ham radio satellites use the 2m and 70cm bands, this one is going have a 5GHz uplink, and a 10GHz downlink.
Don't worry - everyone who knows about this is already freaking out about it, and are working on a cheap solution. We already know that the 10GHz downlink is no problem, because this is the same band used by Dish Network and such. You should be able to use their dishes to get the signal. Some are already discussing how to modify a satellite internet dish for both uplink and downlink.
To address this difficulty, plans are already in place to build at least 4 "uplink/downlink stations" that are accessible with normal ham bands, although the specifics on that haven't been released yet.
Conclusion
If you live outside the USA, I'm afraid your wait will continue. For the rest of us, this is going to be a godsend alternative to using HF for long-distance communications. The biggest challenge will be to not become dependent on it once it's up and running, because, as I said, it is an Air Force satellite, thus, it comes with a kill switch. It's also susceptible to being nuked should SHTF. And, in the event of an emergency, they DO have the ability to control who gets into it, meaning that if you aren't on the "approved list", all you can do is listen-in.
So, is this a "dream come true"? The answer to that is, "yes and no".
