Salah Hamza, the former Chief Engineer and CTO at Egypt’s Nilesat Satellite Company has died. He had been ill for some time having suffered a major stroke some 3 months ago.  He retired from Nilesat in 2014.

Hamza, during his time at Nilesat, was ‘Mr Satellite’ for the hundreds of Middle East channels that flocked to use the all-digital Nilesat fleet at 7 degrees West.

Unfortunately, Hamza had to also be something of an extreme diplomat having to cope on an almost daily basis with satellite jamming of broadcast signals and at one time was attempting work-arounds from signal jamming by a dozen local governments and even break-away organisations who were objecting to some aspect of their local government administrations.

He supervised expansion of Nilesat’s major international teleport and play-out centre at Nilesat’s HQ at 6^th October City, near the famous Giza Pyramids in Cairo. Hamza was also responsible for specifying and then liaising with the construction of Nilesat 101 and its follow-on satellites.

Today, Nilesat – and its local commercial partner Eutelsat – carry around 1000 television channels.

Other posts by Chris Forrester:

1. Rivada visits Terran Orbital’s manufacturing HQ
2. Avanti wins spectrum debt obligation case
3. SpaceX breaks records for re-use launchers
4. IRIS2 already in trouble?
5. Intelsat contemplates next steps
6. SpaceX: 2.7m customers and $180bn value
7. Boeing, Virgin Galactic in court battle
8. Jupiter-3 a changemaker
9. Terran Orbital is again Compliant

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