[Board] Geostationary Microwave Amateur Payload Proposal - ORI

Mon Nov 27 11:22:51 PST 2023

Greetings Frank,

I'd like to answer the questions you posed at the AMSAT-UK
colloquium, present to you the technical support package from Open Research
Institute (ORI) that was given to AMSAT-DL, AMSAT-UK and AMSAT-CA, and
share with you our stand-alone amateur satellite service HEO/GEO design.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

First, you asked about how to request work from the amateur community, and
how to engage.

These are questions we have spent a lot of time thinking about and building
an organization to deliver.

ORI exists because legacy amateur radio groups were not providing
accessible opportunities for modern microwave broadband space and
terrestrial work. There were significant challenges with legacy groups with
respect to diversity and inclusion, transparency, and governance. These
problems have been formally addressed by ORI's Code of Conduct, Participant
and Developer policies, and resolved by daily practice of inclusive and
fair international volunteer participation.

Requesting work should be through a transparent, open, and equitable
process that emphasizes advancement of the radio arts.

ORI has over 200 active daily users on the engineering Slack workspace and
over 2000 in the broader community, united through a mailing list and
newsletter. We have a diverse source of funding, a variety of projects
ranging from compact HF antenna designs to polynomial spline signal
representations.

Our central effort is devoted to a microwave broadband transponder for
space and terrestrial deployment, featuring high-fidelity voice and data
5GHz uplink, authentication and authorization, and a multiplexed DVB-S2/X
downlink at 10 GHz. We have dual band feeds for this frequency plan as well
as 10 GHz / 24 GHz and have planned out 47 GHz / 47 GHz. We have link
budgets, FPGA code, and remotely accessible lab benches with RF test
equipment and FPGA development stations, software tools support, and more.
We believe that our international community can competently and fully
answer the call for proposals made by the ESA. We are ready to engage.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Second is the technical support package from Open Research Institute given
for consideration in the ESA GEO call for proposals.

Formal collaboration with proposing organizations using ORI for technical
support would be enabled with a memorandum of understanding or other
appropriate documentation. This support package has been sent to AMSAT-DL,
AMSAT-UK, and AMSAT-CA. We stand ready to support any other group that
wants to participate in the call for proposal.

An ORI brochure explains the organization, lists the board of directors,
and covers the basic vision and areas of expertise. Brochure pdf is
attached.

ORI publishes designs as they are created. All work is available through
GitHub.

https://github.com/OpenResearchInstitute
https://github.com/Haifuraiya (GEO/HEO payload specific)

We are able to freely publish communications satellite designs because we
did the United States regulatory work to take full advantage of the public
domain carve-outs in ITAR and EAR.

All of this regulatory work (and more) is available at:

https://github.com/OpenResearchInstitute/documents/tree/master/Regulatory

Highlights of the technical repositories are a DVB-S2 (downlink) encoder,
COBS (uplink) decoder, and polyphase (uplink) channelizer in hardware
descriptive language (HDL for FPGAs). Current HDL block under development
is the Opulent Voice uplink demodulator and decoder.

Opulent Voice is ORI's high definition voice and data protocol, which
includes authentication and authorization. It is designed specifically for
amateur satellite service. An article about Opulent Voice from QEX magazine
is attached. It is vastly superior to any VHF-centric amateur digital voice
mode.

Lab resources available include Remote Lab West, a fully remote
FPGA-centric RF workbench. We use Xilinx parts. We have a zc706 with
ADRV9009 and a zcu102 with ADRV9002. We have a full floating Vivado license
free for open source amateur radio work. We have a full MATLAB/Simulink
license with all toolboxes free for open source amateur radio work. These
tools, along with Petalinux, are hosted on the Remote Labs computer, which
runs virtual machines on an Unraid server.

Remote Labs are described in detail in the Readme at:

https://github.com/OpenResearchInstitute/documents/tree/master/Remote_Labs

The Readme includes a link to a video presentation about the labs, which
has the following test equipment:

https://github.com/OpenResearchInstitute/documents/tree/master/Remote_Labs/Test_Equipment

Daily engineering is on ORI's Slack account.

https://openresearchinstitute.slack.com

Meetings at ORI are usually virtually, are almost always recorded, and are
uploaded to ORI's YouTube. The account also has presentations, symposium
and forum talks, technical advisory committee work, and more.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMog2ftoC7zfXbvi5ztUK4w

ORI has a Code of Conduct and Developer and Participant Policies, which are
enforced. We are committed to ethical organizational behavior.

If you find our work described in this support package useful, we would
like to be part of the ESA proposal and help build modern and innovative
amateur satellite equipment for international use.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Third are the high-level documents about our stand-alone HEO/GEO concept,
Haifuraiya.

https://github.com/OpenResearchInstitute/documents/tree/master/Papers_Articles_Presentations/Slide_Presentations/haifuraiya

There are some meetup and workshop videos there.

High-level overview presentation is here:

https://youtu.be/MTk7kyO7eqw?si=qd1dMyyYsIJ9J3QU

An architecture document is here:

https://github.com/OpenResearchInstitute/documents/tree/master/Engineering/Requirements/Architecture

A white paper (FCC filing) about orbits and our views on the amateur
satellite service (MVP) can be found here:

https://github.com/OpenResearchInstitute/documents/tree/master/Regulatory/MVP_FCC_Presentation

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

We would like our community to be considered for inclusion in the ESA
Geostationary Microwave Amateur Payload Proposal. Our board of directors
includes a member from the UK and a member originally from France. We have
volunteer contributors from all over the world and have presented our work
on three continents in the four years we have been incorporated.

While ORI may be headquartered in California, USA, we serve the
international amateur radio satellite community. Our mission is the
research and development leading to the design and implementation of modern
open source GEO/HEO spacecraft.

Thank you,

-Michelle Thompson W5NYV
CEO ORI
+1 858 229 3399
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