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

[Mark Whittington]

Hi Michelle (& all),

Is there any more info available on the FPGA class later this year?  Are
there plans to make it available online?  From the brief mention above it
sounds interesting.

Thanks,

-Mark

On Sat, Aug 17, 2019 at 8:33 PM Michelle Thompson via Ground-Station
<ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
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