[Ground-station] Day 1 at Allen Telescope Array - Breakthrough Listen

[Michelle Thompson]

We don't have a booth at Hamvention this year. I was invited to be part of
the Breakthrough Listen event at ATA and could not in good conscience pass
up an opportunity like that.

We might have a booth at Hamvention next year, depending on scheduling and
priority. HamCation was a much better experience in terms of cost, quality
of the facilities, support from the organizers, friendliness and interest
level of participants, and the number of new members and supporters that we
gained.

I will be at Maker Faire for 2019 with a good number of Phase 4 Ground
engineering volunteers. We have a lot of friends that will be there, and
there's always a large amount of high quality ham radio. We'll be talking
shop and doing a lot of outreach.

Unfortunately, Maker Faire Bay Area and Dayton Hamvention are always on the
same weekend. We've spent the past three years in a row heavily involved in
Hamvention. Last year, we had a very successful booth, demos, meetings, and
gave two talks at Hamvention. We've dedicated a very large amount of time
to Hamvention over the past decade, faithfully serving several
organizations including AMSAT-NA.

Bruce Perens and others will be at Dayton representing us. If there is
something Bruce should know or do, then let him know!

Our next event is DEFCON. We're tentatively scheduled to be in the WiFi
Village to show our work. This is an event with a lot of amateur satcom and
a huge number of hams.

We are focused on HEO/GEO open source payloads (and ground systems) for
amateur radio. We cheer on anyone doing LEOs. It's just not our focus.
AMSAT-NA is not competition. All of our work is freely shared in order to
help all AMSAT organizations do a better job with modern digital
communications.

-Michelle W5NYV




On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 3:09 AM KC9SGV <kc9sgv at gmail.com> wrote:

> Great !
> Will there be a Pase 4 Ground Station booth at Dayton ?
> AMSAT-NA is displaying 4 launch-ready cubesats at their booth.
> Hands-on cubesat building experience for STEM level students.
> Cutout cardboard cubesats for kids.
> Lots of hype towards LEO cubesats.
>
> KC9SGV
> Sent from my iPad
>
> > On May 14, 2019, at 9:29 PM, Michelle Thompson via Ground-Station
> <ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute> wrote:
> >
> > Quick report from the GNU Radio SETI Institute hackfest here at Allen
> Telescope Array. This is a radio telescope in Northern California that is
> very interested in improving integration with GNU Radio and machine
> learning. There are about 30 members on the hackfest team. Participants
> come from a wide variety of backgrounds and areas of expertise. Everyone is
> accomplished, friendly, and more than willing to dive right in to a very
> open-ended and daunting task. We will work here all week. Many of the
> participants get to stay at the dorms and residences on site at the
> observatory. Not all of us could fit on site, so a few of us are in hotels
> in the nearest town (Burney, CA).
> >
> > Several of the participants were part of the Block Party at GRCon18 or
> had met us at DEFCON. I gave a brief update about the progress we've made
> and the lessons learned just since September.
> >
> > The day began with orientation, tours of the control room and the
> telescopes, a history of SETI, and a summary of the Breakthrough series of
> projects. We are here to support Breakthrough Listen. The control room has
> several generations of very impressive digital data-handling circuits.
> >
> > Today's work focused on machine learning for the 42 telescopes in the
> array, writing source blocks that can run the array, improving the SigMF
> metadata format that is used here at the array, tutorials for GNU Radio,
> practice using datasets from ATA, and several other areas. This is a
> significant amount of progress in just the first day.
> >
> > People that brought SDRs can attach them to a telescope and collect live
> data. Several historical datasets have been made available, including
> Voyager and Rosetta. Data collected during the hackfest will be made
> available. We are planning to publish it through the new IEEE dataset
> service. All of the work done here will be published and open source.
> >
> > Questions for the team or staff? Send them and I'll ask!
> >
> > Amateur radio is highly valued here. There are a lot of amateur radio
> operators on the team and on the staff at the observatory. Collaboration
> with the technical amateur and open source community is a priority for
> SETI. This is a very exciting and heartening thing to witness. It's a
> privilege to be a small part of it, support it, and contribute towards the
> goals.
> >
> > While this isn't a Phase 4 specific event or effort, there are several
> aspects of the work that will help us. Anything that improves GNU Radio or
> promotes technical amateur radio is a win, and both of those things appear
> to be well on their way to happening this week.
> >
> > -Michelle W5NYV
> >
>
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