Australis OSCAR 5
After building a satellite tracking antenna and receiving pictures from American weather satellites, we asked, 'done that - what's next?' The next logical step was to build a satellite. The group asked a California based amateur radio group, Project OSCAR, which had built 4 satellites, whether, if we built an amateur radio satellite, could they get it launched? OSCAR said, 'we will try.'
That was enough for us. Ignoring 'experts' who said it couldn't be done, we built Australis in less than a year. Because of delays in America, Australis was not launched until January 1970. It worked as planned, transmitting signals to thousands of amateur radio operators around the world. The AO5 system consisted of two segments, although we didn't recognise them at the time:
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