Yes, but have not found anyone who is also serious and also need some funds to pay for necessary equipment.

The National Archives has lots of good stuff about Prospero, including:

"Operational control of Prospero": http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/SearchUI/Details?ur...

Consider just raising some prize money and then announcing a race for the first group to have confirmed contact with the satellite, and get out of the way?

Also, I would prefer not to do the race as the real motivator for me is the thrill of doing it and the fun of learning about how it was done.

It probably could be done as a Kickstarter and I'm guessing for the low £1,000s (radio, antenna, probably some interesting pre-amp/filter stuff).

I'm really really rusty on VHF, do not have any required licenses and all my HAM contacts have dried up due to old age so that's pretty much all I think I can help with. The most I did in hardware terms in the last 6 months was to make an old Unitra grammophone work again, not quite in the right league :).

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Parabolic...

And a suitable radio set for 'stage 1' (find the thing), and then a suitable transmitter and some modem (probably doable using a SDR or even an audio card connected to the transceiver) to actually talk to it.