Indian Small Satellite Systems Conference -1 - A Report

This is the brief report on the just concluded Indian Small Satellite Systems Conference organised by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) which was attended by Colleges and others participating in or involved with Small Satellite Systems. 

One such Small Satellite is scheduled to be launced by ISRO on the 9th May, 2010. 

Technical Director of AMSAT INDIA, OM Pratap - VU2POP who attended the conference has circulated this report on the conference by email and the same is reproduced here for larger viewership.

(reproduced with permission of OM Pratap)

Hi All

Amsat India was invited to attend the Indian Small Satellite Systems Conference -1 conducted yesterday at ISRO Bangalore.

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 & 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 kick starting 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 both digital with only beacon downlink and no voice transponder. In the next couple of months you will find many cube sats etc with experimental payloads launched.

Amsat India has 2 linear tranponder is 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 2 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 & experiences by hams all over the world with Hamsat.

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 & Upagrah Amateur Radio Club (VU2URC) 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.

Pop

VU2POP

Dir Technical

Amsat India

Hams who attended VU2WMY, VU2GDX, VU2RVJ, Ganesan, Chandrasekhar new hams &myself VU2POP

All those who work through VO-52 are requested again to send in their User Opinion and Experiences to wmy@isac.gov.in or vu2mud@gmail.com;