Information
Read my open letter to the amateur community, which explains what Swatch is doing, how it affects you as an amateur radio operator, and why I'm advocating an immediate boycott of Swatch products until this issue is resolved. You can also review some background information to understand how this situation occured and how I found out about it.
Read the Swatch response to our efforts so far, either on their site or the mirror page here. Also read the second open letter to the amateur community I issued in response1 to their apparent lack of apology and concern for their use of the amateur bands.
Norbert Notthoff, DF5DP, found the URL of Swiss Telecom Office, which is actually called BAKOM. This is the URL for the Amateur Radio Rules for Switzerland. It is in German, but you can click on "Sprache e" which means "language English" and some Javascript action should happen. The German text says, that only personal, technical communication is allowed and third party traffic is absolutely prohibited.
Ed Mitchell, KF7VY, editor of Ham Radio Online wrote a short article which details the basic problems with the Swatch project and some steps that Swatch could take in order to save face with the amateur community.
Ron Hashiro, AH6RH, took the time to copy all the information about the Beatnik off the Swatch site into a non-frames, non-JavaScript format so that anyone can take a look. I've included this file in my mirror of the Swatch Beatnik pages or you can do directly to the Beatnik portion of the actual Swatch site.
From a SpaceNews article, read about the technical details and specs of the Sputnik-99 ("Beatnik") satellite.
Footnotes
-
Was "reponse" ↩