[Ground-station] Ultra96 Progress - LNB on a Stick draft - Microwaves on Monday

[Michelle Thompson]

Hot spot over the past few weeks has been coming to grips with the Ultra96
development. There's plenty going on in our #fpga channel. If you want to
join the effort to port/write/test/design LDPC decode to FPGA, then come
find us there and dive in! This is the most challenging technical part of
the receiver. Once it's working, we will be able to make rapid forward
progress.

We've build bootable sd cards for the Ultra96 in a variety of ways. Methods
include the PetaLinux toolchain as well as utilities from Brennan Ashton (
https://gitlab.com/btashton/ultra96-notes/tree/master).

We will use Vivado to make a project. We'll export a hardware definition
file, then build it into the sd card, then deploy.

For application side, we're looking at using Ubuntu Snaps. We have a draft
user interface. There's updates and bug fixes to Phil Karn's SDR, but it's
not in the repository yet.

Another area of activity on the Ultra96 is an adaptor board to enable use
of particular FMC cards. If we can get pin-to-pin mappings from the Ultra96
to FMC comms boards down and reviewed, then we will layout and build
adaptor boards. This turns the Ultra96 into a capable SDR. This is in
progress and documentation is here:
https://github.com/phase4ground/DVB-receiver/wiki/Proposal:-Open-Research-Institute-to-build-a-board-for-Phase-4-Ground

LNB-on-a-Stick draft is in the repo and some feedback has been
incorporated. Take a look and critique it please:
https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/blob/master/Papers_Articles_Presentations/Papers/LNB-on-a-Stick.pdf

The annual tune-up party for the local microwave club here in San Diego is
this coming Monday. Plenty of chances to test gear and learn more about our
receive band.

Spread the word! Having fun and learning things is a big part of the goal.
If you know someone that would love to join up, please tell them about us
and invite them to join.

-Michelle W5NYV
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