[Ground-station] NDA - Ettus, GOLF, Phase 4 Space

[Bruce Perens]

It's unfortunate when a company allocates money, time, and scarce resources
to our sort of project to see them go unutilized. Besides the real problems
this creates for the people who persuaded their companies to help us, and
their frustration, it reduces our credibility for other collaborations.

We have another problem here. If we are to avoid all of the firewalls AMSAT
had, which were erected in the name of ITAR and EAR, we can't use parts
that are substantially proprietary in nature, like (I assume) the AstroSDR
or (depending on what information is sequestered) event the Ettus.

Depending on the vendor, we may be able to establish releases of
information sufficient to make Open Source *and *Open Hardware possible,
eliminating the ITAR/EAR issue. Or we may not, in which case we should be
considering an implementation with no sequestered details, even if we have
to make it. Or we firewall the hardware project, which IMO is a step
backward.

Rad-hard ASIC is beyond our possibility of manufacture at the moment,
though perhaps a rad-hard RISC-V could attract a wide audience to fund it.
Rad-hard gate-array implementations of microcontrollers are within our
reach. There is the unfortunate issue that the gate-array bitstream formats
are usually undisclosed or under NDA, but that probably doesn't get in our
way as we can simply specify the VHDL files and what tools to use.

    Thanks

    Bruce
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