[Ground-station] Sounding Rockets and FPGAs - at a University

[Alex Wege]

>>"Adapting to harsh and changing conditions quickly and reliably is a big
systems challenge for us. Is a sounding rocket the right entry point to
test this sort of work?"

I think this is an awesome idea! As a recent graduate of the University of
Minnesota rocketry team I can tell you it's difficult to build a perfect
telemetry system for a rocket -- especially supersonic ones.
They might even appreciate just running some adaptive coding and FEC blocks
like in DVB-S2 to improve link stability (assuming they ran into similar
issues).
That would also be an opportunity to test out (by proxy) the dynamics of
our adaptive coding system in a stressful environment.


On a less related note, I think our system would be perfectly suited for
any high altitude ballooning teams to experiment with -- that would be
really cool to see.

-KE0RYT

On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 11:32 AM Jay Francis via Ground-Station
<ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute> wrote:

> Michelle Thompson via Ground-Station wrote on 4/4/21 10:39 AM:
> > If we were to propose an FPGA experiment on a sounding rocket (this is
> > with a University), what would be the best experiment?
> It's probably easier to get FCC STA licenses for sounding rocket
> launches than orbital due to the limited duration.  I've done it a
> couple times now for S-Band telemetry on vehicles.  This could be a way
> to test very experimental modulation/protocols that might not be
> approved for orbital operation.
>
> Flight testing deployment of very small hardware (similar to Ambasat
> size or smaller) may also be possible since there's no orbital debris
> tracking issues.  It could be interesting to have a sounding rocket
> deployment mechanism to test swarms of small networked "satellites".
>
> Experiments flown on sounding rockets aren't necessarily only activated
> in space (unlike cubesats).  They can be designed to run through the
> whole flight.
>
> The flight environment (acceleration, shock and vibe) of most sounding
> rockets is a bit harsher than an orbital launch - be prepared for that,
> or take advantage of it :-)
>
> --Jay, KA1PQK
>
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openresearch.institute/pipermail/ground-station-openresearch.institute/attachments/20210404/cd8c973a/attachment.html>