[Ground-station] GNU Radio Conference - report

[Michelle Thompson]

As most of you know, I spent a large portion over the past year serving as
co-chair of GNU Radio Conference. We had a very successful conference 16-20
September 2019 in Huntsville, AL, USA.

The theme of space communications and amateur radio emphasis paid off.
Thank you to all that came and participated, spread the word, supported
from afar, and helped me solve problems.

The videos of the presentations will be up soon. The publications
(proceedings) are out now. The minutes from the developers' summit are
either completed or in progress, depending on the breakout. This year, the
Capture the Flag (CTF) competition returned and was hugely popular. Thank
you to students from the University of Alabama at Huntsville that ran this
five-day competition. They not only managed the event, but also solicited
and constructed challenges from a wide variety of sources, including
SkySafe and National Instruments. They also accepted three major donated
challenges from participants day-of. Their coordinator was Dr. Tathagata
Mukherjee, at UAH. We deeply appreciate his and his students' time. We
heard loud and clear that contests like CTF are desired for 2020!

Speaking of students, we had over 30 from all over the world. At one point
we ran out of the tickets we set aside for students, and had to add more.
Students presented posters at the poster session, presented their work in
the main track, ran a major event (CTF), volunteered to take minutes,
volunteered as runners, handled floor microphone duty, and got to meet
people that can help them succeed in digital signal processing.

We had a successful special event station. It was a remotely operated Flex.
148 FT8 contacts are in the log book and we have a custom QSL card for
everyone. Thank you to Steve Conklin for making this happen, organizing the
operators, and putting the station in a comfortable and high visibility
place. We had two social events. One was a buffet dinner under the Saturn V
rocket at the Space Center. Jazz band, a bit of dancing, an outstanding
museum, and plenty of conversation. The other was an Art Battle, where five
artists had 20 minutes in two rounds to paint an image from canvas to done.
Participants voted on the winners and then the 10 paintings were auctioned
off, with all proceeds going to GNU Radio. DJ, drinks, and food rounded out
the evening.

Workshops are a big part of the week-long conference.

The PLUTO workshop from Analog Devices was very highly rated. Robin Getz
not only organized the AD workshops, but also provided a large number of
PLUTO SDRs for students attending. So large that UAH is now able to found a
lending library of the PLUTOs for student learning and research in their
engineering department, to get the maximum possible use out of the
donation. Loans will be for short or long term, such as a semester or year.

Ettus Research had to add an additional session of their Getting Started
with GNU Radio workshop due to popular demand. Neel Pandeya from Ettus
Research was primarily responsible for organizing and executing multiple
workshops and handling the overflow demand. The workshop schedule from
Ettus already included their very popular RFNoC workshop!

Phase 4 Ground and Space are heavily dependent on GNU Radio, so
volunteering time and effort to improve GNU Radio with a quality annual
event (fundraising, networking, technical presentations, competitions,
workshops, tutorials, demonstrations, vendor exhibits) was an easy decision
to make.

It does take a lot of time to chair a large event, and that takes time away
from other things.

So some good news. I'm coordinating the CTF for GNU Radio 2020, but will be
much less busy on event organization. We had several highly qualified
volunteers step up with event organization. That means more time for Phase
4.

I'm doing my best to increase funding, communications with, and support
from other organizations. There are elements in some other traditional
amateur radio organizations that are very grumpy that we exist. Showing up
and cheerfully doing the work and not giving up should dissolve this
grumpiness over time. I of course can't do this alone, so if you see an
opportunity to speak up and support digital microwave open source amateur
satellite work, then please do!

-Michelle W5NYV
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