Indian Small Satellite Systems Conference

AMSAT-India was invited to attended the Indian Small Satellite Systems Conference (ISSSC) held April 28 at ISRO in Bangalore.

Pop VU2POP has posted this report on the AMSAT bulletin board:

Amsat India was represented by Ganesan (our Hamsat 2 designer) and myself VU2POP.

ISSSC was a one-day programme from 9 am to 5.30 pm.
It was very interesting and as many papers were presented and topics discussed the time was short it got over by 7 pm.

One day is too short and hopefully next year it will be 2 days.

However we thank ISRO for kickstarting a very interesting platform for interaction of ISRO with various educational institutions including Amsat India who are into ham satellite projects.

Important topics were on the current Small satellite developments and the future trends of small satellites including Mini, Micro, Pico sats etc.

Hamsat VO-52 too falls into the small sats, to add many students all over the world have been building student sats as projects and in India too, nearly 26 Universities have got into building student sats with various payloads.

Most Ednl. institutions already have a ham club and some institutions are now setting up ham clubs in their institutions to help learn more of ham satellite operations and facilitate building ham band payloads.

As of now most of them are either digital with only beacon downlink and no voice transponder. In the next couple of months you will find many CubeSats etc with experimental payloads launched.

Amsat India has 2 linear tranponders ready and we Amsat India are asking ISRO for a higher orbit to cover a larger foot print and longer pass duration. It's no use having another LEO as HAMSAT 1.

Hamsat 1 will be celebrating its 5th birthday on 5 May and ISTRAC has been monitoring its health and its utilisation, they report that Hamsat 1 is in good health and should serve the hams for many more years. In this regard there was an email by VU2WMY Mani a few days ago asking for USER feedback like utilisation and experiences by hams all over the world with Hamsat 1.

Please send in your reports , utilisation and experiences with Hamsat by email and the same will be forwarded to ISRO. Looking forward to all your reports comments.

We would like to thank ISRO for the HAMSAT 1 and we look forward to HAMSAT 2. Finally we thank Programme Dir and Project Director - Small Satellite & Uppagrah Amateur Radio Club for the kind invitation to participate in the ISSSC-1 and we look forward to many such platforms for the development of small satellite systems with the participation Educational Institutions & Amsat India.

Best regards

Pop, VU2POP

Dir Technical
Amsat India

Hams who attended were VU2WMY, VU2GDX, VU2RVJ, Ganesan, Chandraskar new hams & myself VU2POP.

AMSAT-India
http://www.amsatindia.org/

AMSAT Bulletin Board AMSAT-BB
http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/tools/maillist/

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)
http://www.isro.org/

HAMSAT VO-52 videos
http://www.southgatearc.org/news/april2010/
hamsat_vo52_videos.htm