[VLM]

You probably want to talk to the ham radio AMSAT organization who've been doing stuff like that since the 60s.

I've been a ham a long time and its interesting to see the progress. Back when I was a gen-x kid amsat was about 20 years old and had just barely broken two digits of launched satellites and there were never more than a couple in orbit at a time. Now a days there's two digits of ham radio satellites launched per year...

The satnogs project is pretty interesting to see what goes into the ground station for a small satellite. Maybe start there.

AFAIK other than some obscure situations involving the ISS and some APRS satellites, there has never been any AMSAT multi-satellite networking, but at the current incredible rate of expansion I'd expect to see hobbyists having something like that by 2030 or so.