[Ground-station] HamCation Report!

[Michelle Thompson]

Orlando HamCation
--------------------------
HamCation was a success for recruitment, marketing, and education. The
visitors were positive, enjoyable, and interested in learning more. We got
excellent feedback and earned several new volunteers. HamCation staff and
support were very good (superior to Hamvention). Customer service and
security were competent and available. The show is well-run, growing, and
developing into one of the larger annual amateur radio shows.

We sold one Trans-Ionospheric badge for Phase 4 Ground fundraising. This
did not make back our booth fee, but it's helpful! A large pile of people
learned about hackable conference badges and were very impressed with our
amateur radio theme. Sales at amateur radio events haven't been that great,
but the reception has been extremely positive.

If you haven't bought a Trans-Ionospheric, it's not too late.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Trans-Ionospheric-hackable-conference-badge-DEF-CON-26-Collectable/123328684692?hash=item1cb6f66294:g:qq8AAOSw8Wdbfzd~:rk:1:pf:0

There may be others for sale from people that bought them at DEFCON, but
the "madscientistsclub" is us, and all proceeds will go to ORI for Phase 4
Ground dev board.

We helped put on a forum, we staffed a booth for ORI and another for TAPR,
and we had enough volunteers and staff to tour the show ourselves.

Strategic Planning
-------------------------

We had discussions about the HamSci Space Weather Station (SWS) with TAPR.

We learned a lot. I believe we need to make some decisions about our
involvement in SWS.

There's a lot of potential upside. There's also a lot of work required to
get to the point where it's an easy "yes". That work consists almost
entirely of systems engineering and project management. There are multiple
levels of potential involvement.

So, we're going to do some work here to figure out how much work is
involved. There is, as you all know, a potential satellite project! This is
super exciting. It will be open source and have an amateur radio payload,
if the rest of the system can be designed and deployed. This satellite is a
LEO space weather station. The satellite coordinates observations from the
ground by providing observations from above. Pretty neat! In some of the
informational interviews with space weather scientists, it turns out this
sort of setup would be valuable and desired.

Since the SWS (obviously) needs a receiver board, we are looking at
coordinating with TAPR in order to get a dev board done sooner. Since many
of the functions of both SWS and Phase 4 Ground are shared, this
opportunity is well worth studying and putting in time to sort out. We
spent many hours talking this over at HamCation, and we are continuing with
the block diagrams, system questions, and other discussions on this list
and on Slack. We have some additional help on the receiver architecture,
and we are starting on getting the LDPC into FGPA.

Thank you!
---------------

Thank you to all the volunteers and visitors that made this such an
enjoyable and productive trip. It's a privilege to be able to do this sort
of thing. We're doing our best to bring our radio system to life.

Please share your questions and comments!

-mdt
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