[Ground-station] Question for ORI:

[Michelle Thompson]

A question has been posed:

"NASA wants to commercialize TDRS and the private sector is working on
making Ku and Ka band terrestrial links usable in space. This only works to
the advantage of big players that can close these links (NRO, NASA, etc)
and leaves it out of reach from hobby folks. The barrier to entry and
complexity are rather large (I'm working with SCaN and APL on some of this
at work).

https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-r/oth/0c/0a/R0C0A00000D0017PDFE.pdf

Long story short, I think society needs to do this for LORA. Imagine,
having a cubesat that can ping Swarm with "I'm alive" and also get two way
messaging for TT&C/Health/Whatevs. Apparently, there is a regulatory
distinction between Earth-Space and Space-Space and folks are trying to be
sneaky in allowing dual use for only a few bands. Even if your satellite
lost attitude control, the nature of VHF/UHF would allow you to phone back
home from space via an in space LORA network and potentially help you
recover your satellite.

My original work was for Iridium in terms of using Commercial networks on
cubesats and then expanded to broader networks but in terms of SWAP, LORA
and SWARM are better and I'm including them in a smallsat paper this year.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7500525
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4839583

Do you think this is dumb? That would be question 1 :)

And if not, does Open Research have anyone that knows how to navigate the
regulatory bits to make LORA usable as an inter satellite relay? I'm
willing to put in all the work needed but how to write a letter to the FCC
requires finesse and sneaking into these regulatory chats is rough. You can
probably accomplish using the network with an experimental license but
permanent regulatory authority would make things easier to proliferate."

-Michelle W5NYV
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