[Ground-station] Open Research Institute DEFCON 27 Financial Report + next steps

[Michelle Thompson]

Thank you to Paul KB5MU for preparing this report!

Here's the rundown on how we did fundraising at DEFCON 27.

In short, very well. We are now sold out of Trans-Ionospherics and we
received other donations as well.

How much do we have, today, in the bank? $9,910.28

What will we use it for?

Well, that's 0.2% of what we need for four 6U GEO spacecraft and four
spares to put our open source broadband microwave amateur payloads into
orbit.

However, it's more than enough to support any ground station development to
serve the FDMA up and TDM down system that these spacecraft (along with the
Virginia Tech 4B payload) are designed to support. As previously reported,
due to an additional donation, we have been able to purchase 10 sets of
ICEbreaker FPGA kits for an amateur radio satellite digital communications
class in the fall of 2019. Our goal here is to build the technical corps of
amateur radio in the areas of FPGA design.

Thank you to Paul KB5MU, Michael KK6OOZ, and Rose (TBD) for their
assistance at the ORI booth at DC27.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- More Longer Stuff

In addition to fundraising at our "Tonight's the Night Volcano" booth, we
demonstrated the channelizer from Theseus Cores. Recent work has
dramatically improved stability and performance. There were no time outs or
other glitches over the entire weekend. We used it on the FM broadcast band
and also got it working at 5GHz. There was some confusion here about how to
configure the radio source in RFNoC for multiple antennas, but we figured
it out.

We talked about Open Research Institute, GNU Radio, GNU Radio Conference,
Libre Space, SatNOGs, and the many other open source groups and digital
technologies that are of interest to amateur radio.

We were very busy Friday - Sunday. This was the first year for the Ham
Radio Village, and it was a rousing success. Planning has already begun for
next year!

The audience was young, enthusiastic, well-informed, and more diverse than
most amateur radio conferences. Nearly 130 people were licensed at the
license test session in the village, over 27,000 people attended the
conference, and like most big events, there was way more to do than one can
manage to absorb. One of the big highlights of the Ham Radio Village was a
live demo of QO-100 through a remote station by John GI7UGV. A foxhunting
event was hosted from the Village along with WSPR station, advanced APRS
demo station, constant churn of show and tell, and an excellent talk from
Smitty Halibut about direction antennas, direction finding, and the
electronics techniques required to succeed in ARDF.

More soon,
-Michelle W5NYV
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openresearch.institute/pipermail/ground-station-openresearch.institute/attachments/20190817/48a867d0/attachment.html>