Communications services provided by the PACSAT-1, UOSAT-5, and KITSAT-1 amateur radio satellites

While many proposals to provide communications services via low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites have been appearing in the literature, engineers, researchers, and experimenters in the amateur radio service have been advancing the state of the art in single LEO store-and-forward satellite design and application. The scope of this paper will be limited to the PACSAT-1, UOSAT-5, and KITSAT-1 satellites, whose primary mission is to provide store-and-forward message relay services for radio amateurs. The paper emphasizes three major areas: (1) a description of the spacecraft; (2) access to the satellite-based file system from the user's viewpoint; and (3) a review of current usage patterns