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

[Leffke, Zachary]

Had a sec to get this out and offer my two cents:

Short Version (if you can believe it):  A lot of the faculty that engage with (or would like to engage with) ORI at VT are ‘Research Faculty’ meaning our salaries and our time spent comes from research contract dollars and we don’t get any (or at least very little) funding from the university itself (0% of my salary comes from student tuition).  This means we have to ‘pay the bills’ and have very little time for side projects.  We also have to spend a portion of our time on ‘business development’ and for those that are willing, volunteering time for student project advising or new concepts of interest to us.  I for example also am working on a Telescope program for SSA research, low cost phased arrays for various projects, helping on this year’s undergrad sounding rocket program, and various collections of ad hoc student advising related to cyber physical security for aviation systems (Active duty Army cyber officer’s Master’s thesis), HF comms for military (ROTC/Cadet project), and helping an AOE/ECE senior design team design and test a prototype ‘VT built’ deployable UHF antenna for cubesats to name a few…..all currently ‘unfunded’.  My point is, I stay busy (and those are just my personal examples, a lot of our research faculty do the same thing...one of my colleagues is rebooting High Altitude Ballooning as a ‘regular thing’ at VT, and is the new advisor to our Ham Radio club, VTARA aka K4KDJ that took over for Bob when he retired).  The students do the same thing and volunteer nights and weekends frequently on projects of interest to them.  Those volunteer efforts are in addition to our sponsored research programs that are ‘100%’ of our work day.  If we can structure project efforts like ‘sponsored research’ and there is actual funding for research faculty time and student time (as undergrad wage researchers and/or graduate research assistants) than we can actually charge a percentage of our time to the project and focus.  This also gets senior University ‘management’ off our backs, because at the end of the day, they are looking at bottom dollar ‘research expenditure’ numbers (from the university’s perspective, its our ACADEMIC departments that are responsible for student engagement/development, and the RESEARCH groups might engage with students which is all well and good, but they want to see research dollars moving through the university).  Moving ORI projects from the ‘volunteer time’ category to the ‘sponsored research’ category will go a long way to ‘getting real work done.’  Having to bid/compete for work, student internships, etc. are all fair game and part of our ‘normal business’ operations.  Having hard deadlines, contract deliverables, reviews, reports, etc. are all good things that keep us focused on the task at hand (so long as there is appropriate funding to support working towards those goals).  I’m not saying that ORI or ARDC specifically needs to cough up money, and we can partner together on larger efforts/proposals to get the funding (like the NSF dollars Michelle mentioned, or possible DURIP style efforts), but that would need to fit in the framework of our business development efforts where we asses things like ‘probability of win’ (where NSF and DARPA for example are notoriously low Pwin historically) to make sure its worth the time invested to go after the work.

Oversimplified summary:  Money talks, and if we can fund our time (research faculty and students) to focus on research topics where ORI is the ‘customer’ (or partner for larger efforts) there will be significantly larger return on investment compared to volunteer side project efforts (where you are effectively banking on the supervisor ‘caring’ about your project and having available time).

That’s my quick two cents (maybe obvious), keep reading for longer version, with an example at the end of ‘what worked’ from a partnership perspective:

Maybe obvious, but one item I’ll go ahead and mention for the ‘what works’ column is funding.  For those that don’t know me I am ‘Research Faculty’ at VT and work in a Research Center called the Hume Center, which is very different organizationally than academic or tenure track faculty.  For me (and I suspect many others) we are ‘soft money’ researchers meaning we are funded almost entirely by research contracts (and occasionally grants) which we refer to a ‘sponsored research’.  This is in contrast to academic faculty that are ‘hard money’ funded through the University directly (for example, 0% of my salary comes from student tuition dollars).  These contracts come with deadlines, deliverables, reviews, and occasionally published papers (that we aren’t paid for but is an important thing for academia, particularly our grad students) and is very different than most ‘academic grants’ that come with few strings attached.  We bill according to ‘Level of Effort’ which boils down to what percentage of our time we spend on the various programs.

What this ultimately means is that we have very little time for ‘side projects’ because we are constantly under the gun to meet the contract deliverables.  For me personally, most of my ‘student supervision’ time is volunteer and I spend a lot of nights and weekends trying to work on new research areas that are not currently funded.  All of the sounding rocket work I’ve done (and commented on this list about in the past) was all volunteer effort for me personally (yes it’s a NASA program, managed through Colorado Space Grant, and the students have a budget from various non-NASA sponsors to buy our seat on the rocket and the payload components, but my time for involvement is 0% funded).

The point of the above is to say, in order to get ‘real work’ done, the best way to get focused attention is to turn it into a ‘sponsored research’ style program.  We can try supervising the occasional ‘side project’ (like supervising an undergrad or two who might be doing an independent study to analyze a particular problem), but it will always be a ‘side project’ if its unfunded and our attention will be subject to the ebb and flow of the sponsored programs deliverables that actually pay the bills.  This is why I like Bruce’s comments/suggestions about ORI flipping things around and ‘owning’ the process.  If we have funding to supervise specific research sponsored by ORI (perhaps funded by ARDC grants, or other sources like NSF, etc.) we can treat it like a sponsored research program, and actually focus faculty time on it.  Meeting deadlines, doing reviews, etc. are all GOOD pressure that keep us engaged.  Making the process competitive is also good, and we are totally fine having to ‘compete’ for work through research proposals and such.  If ORI put out something akin to an RFI/RFP that we then had to bid for, that would fit right in with our ‘normal business’.  The contracting part of it (which I am NOT an expert in) can be handled a couple ways, some of which offer more ‘bang for the buck’ for the sponsor (grants through the VT Foundation for example).  We can also act as partners with ORI and propose for other projects where the shape of things might look like ORI as the prime contractor with VT as a sub-contractor, or with both acting as ‘equal partners’ would just depend on what we were proposing and to who.

As an example, there was the GEO effort a few years back with AMSAT-NA (there is a lot to potentially discuss here, but I’m focusing on the ‘getting stuff done’ partnership side of things, not the mission itself).  In that scenario, we received a donation with the ultimate goal of getting approval to fly an Amateur payload on an experimental Air Force satellite.  We used the donation to fund research faculty member time (although technically, all of my personal time on GEO was volunteer effort…I never charged to that fund) and student time (as wage researchers / graduate research assistants) to actually work directly with the Air Force and the satellite manufacturer (Millennium).  The team was very diverse in that we had RF engineers, electrical engineers (focusing on things like power), AOE/ME folks (doing mechanical/thermal/launch analyses), systems engineers, etc.  We had weekly meetings with the Air Force and AMSAT as well as internal meetings for design work, had to navigate the restricted/unrestricted nature of the project (some stuff ITAR because its Air Force, some stuff proprietary because its Millennium), lots of systems engineering work, did thermal, mechanical, and electrical work, RF And comms work with AMSAT (mostly Michelle, Marc Franco, Jerry Buxton, and Mike Parker at Rincon that donated the AstroSDR that was the core of the design) on the Air interface side of things (all public info), had multiple reviews, attended conferences to talk about the project and drum up support (GNU Radio and AMSAT Symposium)…….ultimately resulting in approval to build a payload that met all of the interface requirements to a level approved by the Air Force and a PDR level design (we were even to the point of talking integration schedules and when people would travel from Va to Ca to integrate the payload).  We had to answer to AMSAT (a 501-C3, although not legally, we had a $0 MOU in place, but obviously AMSAT is the ‘customer’ in this case from VT’s perspective), the Air Force (US Gov’t / DoD), Millennium Space Systems (company), and Rincon Research .  In that case we were successful because of the funding.  That was a fairly large effort with lots of organizational complexities, but from my point of view it worked really well because there was funding (thanks entirely to the donor) for our folks to focus on the task at hand.  Obviously the overall program didn’t pan out (for reasons I would argue were outside of AMSAT / VT’s control….different conversation), but for the specific task we were paid for (PDR design, get the thumbs up from AF/MSS), we were successful.

As always, my two cents on the topic (other VT folks might have different perspectives).

-Zach, KJ4QLP
--
Research Associate
Aerospace & Ocean Systems Lab
Ted & Karyn Hume Center for National Security & Technology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
Work Phone: 540-231-4174
Cell Phone: 540-808-6305

From: Ground-Station <ground-station-bounces at lists.openresearch.institute> On Behalf Of Michelle Thompson via Ground-Station
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 3:33 PM
To: Thomas Savarino <thomas.savarino at mac.com>
Cc: Michelle Thompson via Ground-Station <ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute>
Subject: Re: [Ground-station] Sounding Rockets and FPGAs - at a University

Where are the successful industry-university-opensource partnerships? It is definitely not all bad news or misunderstandings. It's really difficult to pull off collaborations given the very different goals and methods of the (at least) three communities involved. Getting a better fit between communities and getting better results does mean looking at what did or did not work.

What does work?

Stanford, MIT, VT, and many other schools are way ahead of the game and are, or have recently been, innovative in getting broad involvement behind student work. Some of this appears to be 1) firmly enabling fundamental research topics and 2) overfunding to the point where research risks can be tolerated and 3) having a pipeline ready for productized proprietary/secret work in order to keep the funding coming in.

None of these programs are perfect. But, relatively small investments have resulted in enormous impact and results.

With the potential for many tens of billions of dollars of increased spending on NSF coming up rapidly in the US Congress, it seems that working well with "The Academy" remains and will be a very important option. Even for smaller operations like ORI. Any increase in spending is going to go through all of the many traditional mechanisms, such as NSF and NASA. These are mechanisms that have produced an enormous quantity of work that, in most cases, can be read and used by us for free. There's no way we can do what we do without that body of work.

With the educational mission becoming more and more important to the amateur radio service (and to the foundations that can fund ambitious work) then it's going to be up to us to learn how to fit in and adapt, when pursuing this sort of thing. That means understanding what the fundamental research topics of a particular institution (or professor) are. Sometimes this is easy to figure out, and sometimes it is not!

This is just part of the landscape and it's just part of what we do. We can work on forward error correction and communications systems entirely apart from academia, conferences, seminars, and student projects.

I believe that there's so much potential mutual benefit possible with "big education", that there's an obligation to keep at it. The reason I'm talking about it on the list and asking for feedback and sorting through how this relates to wider open source work is to get our volunteers the best possible opportunities.

-Michelle W5NYV



On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 11:05 AM Michelle Thompson <mountain.michelle at gmail.com<mailto:mountain.michelle at gmail.com>> wrote:
This raises a point that keeps coming up over the years. And you inspire consideration about another issue.

There's a huge amount of work/results in closed literature. Usually due to national security concerns.

Part of the problem in doing open source work is running into people and volunteers that know something can be done, but they can't cite the source and do not feel like they can describe it. Missiles and rockets are certainly in this category.

There has to be something that we can verify and test with the really remarkable work we are doing. We have some very good ideas identified so far. Let's keep trying to come up with ideas and clarify them as best we can.

Based on what we've talked about, it seems that we have to "market" our ideas better to schools in order to get them to care. It's on us to make it "cool" enough for students to select. I'm completely biased and all-in on what we do, but full time people like me, and a 501(c)(3), and funding, have not been enough in the recent past to be "picked". I am actively trying to up the game here, any way I can, to get the work done and people educated. It's my fault for not knowing how to do this in a way that gets us recognized and engaged.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

There's another subject here, and it needs to be brought up.

Working things out from first principles, when it's necessary, can only be done in practice by people with the time, talent, and treasure necessary. In other words, by people with relative privilege. Or, by people that accept the burden and try anyway. I can think of several active projects in this category, some of which we support.

And this sort of thing harshly limits the promise of open source work in two ways. 1) we sometimes really do need to liberate closed work and this is uncomfortable and requires some brass body parts and 2) it can most easily be done by people with economic privilege.

This brings up how to pay for open source work. Not just for creation, but for sustaining engineering.

I can try and describe this with words, but this image is better:

https://xkcd.com/2347/

We have to acknowledge this. I am not sure that we can address it, but it's a really big problem. If we can't solve it, then we have to accept some very unhappy limitations on open source work.

We know and understand that all the major amatuer radio philanthropic organizations (in general) decline to pay overhead and salaries. They will pay for materials, parts, boards, and tools. But, they have rejected paying for overhead or salaries. Oddly, they will fund scholarships. The scholarship economy, the scholarship marketing movement, and scholarship funds are all about overhead and salary. And, privilege.

First, scholarships fund the administration of schools. The reason we have a scholarship economy is because overhead and administrative costs are the things that have caused tuition to rise so sharply in the United States. This is a problem almost unique to the United States, and I apologize to readers outside of the US where this may not apply.

Second, if you only fund college scholarships, and won't directly pay people to do open source work, then it's decided that the fund will support a system that filters out a huge number of talented people. As an extremely well-educated person, who went to an elite university, I am here to tell you that only funding college scholarships to "get technical work done" really does contribute to a homogenous tech scene. Technology is sexist, racist, and bigoted. If you are going "what?!" or want or need a good introduction to this problem, then https://www.npr.org/2019/03/17/704209639/caroline-criado-perez-on-data-bias-and-invisible-women is a great start.

Philanthropic organizations that want to change the way things work on the ground, for real people, have to rethink their approach. If we only fund university scholarships and molecules (PCBs, components, etc) we are missing  almost all the leverage.

I assert that if scholarships can be funded, then so can open source worker salaries. Open source worker salaries result in same or better civic good than scholarships. Direct payments to vetted workers might even be more efficient and will result in better economic outcomes to open source work. People directly affected by bad tech done by homogenous commercial interests? They are the very best people to pay to produce better work.

Why is there resistance to paying for overhead and salaries?

Because of a real and legitimate concern about waste and laziness and fraud and misunderstandings and completely different expectations and value systems.

I'll give one example in the category of the work that is quite often paid for now, that was a complete and total mismatch.

I was and am involved with an engineering project at a University, involving several large corporate partners. They had a certification program through a major online education app. This was a big open source effort. There was a paid (employed!) open source evangelist, traction with volume production for the hardware, and lots of truly great code/applications/creativity/Makers etc.

When it came time to produce the instruction - that's when we had a big problem. These were classes that people were going to take online for a *certification* from a university. The deal was two professors, with full support of the university, took the entire amount of money to produce the educational content and... the money disappeared into the University. No content was produced. After an appropriate amount of time for content to appear, inquiries were made.

Nothing could be done.

Now, this was not what was supposed to happen. There was a contract, there were expectations, multiple meetings, lists, posts, commitments, community momentum, a contract from the online supplier, etc.

The professors produced brief 1-minute or so introductions for the 40 class sessions. They didn't provide expected instruction, they did not review anything, and they did not produce content themselves. Getting email answered was hard. They honestly thought they had provided full value.

They took the entire amount for the entire program and expressed genuine surprise that there was any unhappiness at all. It was about 40 minutes total content for a very large amount of money. This was "they way it was done". Ranks were closed.

But, the show really had to go one. So, volunteers organized by the project employee came up with the contracted educational content, got A/V support at additional cost, edited the classes, dealt with the educational content distributor's many requirements, handled the student forum, handled the customer service forum, did the labs, and updated the content as the platform and the framework used rapidly changed. For a while. With no compensation, because the entire amount for all of this work was consumed by the university up front.

The only option to enforce some sort of sharing of the money was to sue.

That option was not pursued. It was politically impossible for an industry-backed and industry-funded consortium to sue a university where three of the board members had graduated from. Total non-starter.

The staff member and volunteer corps on this project were rapidly burned out. The people that were really good at this work, and wanted the project to continue, moved quickly away. No project like this is planned now or for the future. The university doesn't understand why the "community" isn't "more forthcoming" with "efforts". Well, it's because they all remember what happened.

So, yes. There's reasons for declining to fund "overhead" and "salaries" when stories like this are not uncommon. I know many of you reading this have very similar stories of your own.

However, a blanket prohibition hits that team in Nebraska (xkcd) pretty hard. They can't get the justice of compensation for their work. Yes, the project was given/published as a gift. But, as we know, a gift economy only works when there is reciprocity of at least respect, if not value. Lacking both, it collapses over time.

If we want open source work to be enduring, then we have to start seriously considering paying people to do the work, instead of assuming only rich educated people will spend literally years of their lives putting up with the static to make great things happen. All endeavors succeed or fail based on how they can scale. We have a scaling problem in open source, and in open source funding, and none of us are immune from it. One of the ways we can solve it is "pay the people that can do the work".

Larger foundations that have the money, and need to spend it, have a unique opportunity here to fundamentally change the world. Yes, work on university projects. But, please, seriously consider paying open source workers directly. There are so many people that would do this full time if they could. They've said so. They are not hard to find. A contract for 1-5 years for specific deliverables is an easy legal document. The benefits are enormous. Right now, we have dozens of really amazing open source workers begging for dozens of dollars on Patreon and Kickstarter. Philanthropic organizations could fund all this work, today. That's literally just the tip of the iceberg. It's only the most privileged and most able open source workers that have set these sorts of things up.

Back to sounding rockets - I'm going to move forward with some discussions as soon as some school deadlines are done. I am hoping we can take advantage of both Research and Development opportunities.

More soon,
-Michelle W5NYV



On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 8:13 PM Thomas Savarino via Ground-Station <ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute<mailto:ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute>> wrote:
I think that some meaningful work of integrating navigation and communication is possible here.  I got the idea from some email where someone said something about using the sounding rocket behavior for something.

I had two ideas for experiments
1. Attach cheap accelerometers to crystal frequency sources and measure the frequency drifts during rapid accelerations. This measurement could provide an error signal somehow to correct the main clock frequency in a system.
2. It might be combined with something else, maybe a 3DOF Inertial measurement unit that would measure accelerations and maybe autocorrect Doppler shifts that occur during a flight.
I suspect that these ideas are pretty old in some areas, like ballistic missiles, but getting it to work wouldn’t be that easy.
I think that some meaningful work of integrating navigation and communication is possible here.

So, there you go.

Best
S

Sent from my iPad


On Apr 4, 2021, at 2:47 PM, Alex Wege via Ground-Station <ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute<mailto:ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute>> wrote:

>>"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<mailto: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



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