[Ground-station] Notes from 13 July 2020 Office Hours

[Michelle Thompson]

Here are the notes from Office Hours! Thank you to everyone that attended.
I'm working on action items right now.

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Mechanical design for ground station was discussed. We are most likely
going to have to hire a mechanical designer. Our last really great lead got
hired by a startup and has no time! We are not in bad shape here for GEO or
Lunar but if we want LEO tracking (and I believe we do) then we have some
design and test remaining. Nothing to report on dual band feed since the
SDMG group meetup with Paul Wade, who had recommendations and warnings
about productizing the dual band feed.

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User experience and user interface work was discussed. We will be making
efforts to find an HTML5 volunteer for the UI before hiring someone.

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Some of us will be presenting at DEFCON WiFi Village about various things
(antennas, machine learning, and ionospheric studies). We will miss having
a booth and demonstrations at DEFCON. We will adapt our presentations and
demonstrations to the best of our ability. I think it's clear some
adaptation and adjustment is going to be required for a while.

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Soon we will review the authentication and authorization protocol and
sequence diagram. It's in progress!

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Soon we'll review changes to the boardset definition, which is slightly
*more* than what the Phase 1 proposal outlined. One idea discussed in the
Office Hours was to use Trenz boards now, and lay out the FPGA directly
later. SerDes interfaces discussed, power vs. cooling discussed, redundancy
strategy discussed. We will be able to add an SSD for recording
(validation, verification, and extending the functionality to SETI and
other projects that want a wideband data recorder).

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We have had an NDA with Vorago Technologies for about a year. They sell
radiation hardened 32 bit ARM M0 and M4 processors. We now have the M4 data
as well as the M0 data and will have a call with them shortly to discuss
needs for Gateway and 6U.

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We talked about redundancy strategies and R5, coreflight, and the ways the
Vorago processor relates to any processor in the FPGA. We talked about
pricing and engineering models.

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With effort, we got our Rent-a-GEO grant proposal in the ARDC system.
https://www.ampr.org/

Proposal attached.

We spent some time talking about how to use this, how fast we could get
people to use it, could we get a catalog of satellites that have things we
can receive now so that people just point their dish to Rent-a-GEO and
enjoy, and so on. This is not a straightforward ham band project, but does
provide a large amount of engineering work products that will help amateur
radio payloads. Plus it's fun.

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With effort, we got our AmbaSat Inspired Sensor Package in the ARDC system.
https://www.ampr.org/

Proposal attached.

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With effort, we got our Phase 2 transponder proposal in the ARDC system.
https://www.ampr.org/

Proposal attached.

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Our CJ Request continues to make its way through the State Department. DHS
and DOD have replied. It is in BIS/EA right now. I don't know what the
outcome will be or when we will receive an answer. It could be very
positive (we celebrate), negative (then we appeal), returned without action
(we do it again), or something in between (we adapt and take full
advantage).

This helps all amateur radio organizations doing this type of work in the
US. It helps our international partners because it reduces risk for
everyone.

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Morning US Pacific meetup on Thursday?

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-Michelle W5NYV
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