[Ground-station] Update on donated dishes

[Michelle Thompson]

Here's some background and the current status as I understand it for the
donated dishes that Doug Phelps is/was coordinating.

At AMSAT Symposium 2017, Doug introduced himself to me, explained that he
knew of some really neat dishes that we might be interested in, and offered
to coordinate it if I could get a donation/tax letter for the company that
owned them.

The dishes were going to be scrapped, were in great shape, and fit our
project and other similar projects pretty well. We talked in person,
exchanged contact information, and continued to work out the details after
the conference. I talked with him on the phone and over email several times
and things moved forward.

A donation letter was written from AMSAT to the vendor where the dishes
were stored, and Doug started working on finding a shipping solution.

We put out the call and got a lot of interest. Over half of the 30 dishes
were spoken for by a variety of people and I offered to take the remaining
ones so that Doug didn't get stuck with them.

Doug gave two updates on shipping. The bought-new shipping costs for these
dishes was very high, back when the vendor ordered them. Freight shipping
is fairly reasonable. I suggested we combine some shipments to places like
San Diego where multiple dishes would go.

Around July 4th, Doug completely stopped replying to email and phone
messages.

Since I've been on travel since July, I didn't do anything more on this
part of the project than write him every few weeks with offers to help and
asking for updates.

I was optimistic that Doug would resurface with a plan and schedule for
shipping. At this point, I haven't heard from him in nearly 3 months. I've
written or called over a dozen times. I hope he's ok.

Next step: I'm going to call the vendor and ask them if the dishes are
still there and see what we can/need to do to get them out to people that
wanted them. It's a bit trickier to try and do this remotely. The dishes
are in the midwest and I'm on the west coast (San Diego, CA).

I'll do my best to restart the process and will update this post. Worst
case, we'll just have to move on and keep looking for quality dishes for
experiments and stations.

-Michelle W5NYV
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