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

[Michelle Thompson]

Thank you Zach, I appreciate the articulate explanation.

I think this means we have to look like, or comply with the requirements
of, sponsored research from the commercial sector - in order to get any
student time at all?

The people responsible for the GEO effort a few years ago are at ORI.

We've grown since then, and added expertise, raised 5x the funding, and
have results.

The donation you describe - is this the $100,000 paid to Millenium Space
Systems for the engineering review? That worked, because the design was
(and is, in its present form) useful and of high quality. It was not a
surprise that it passed the review.

Was this engineering study the only work product?

If so, then is it fair to say that we have to come up with a lot more
funding in order to work with VT?

-Michelle W5NYV



On Wed, Apr 7, 2021 at 9:29 AM Leffke, Zachary via Ground-Station
<ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute> wrote:

> 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> 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> 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> 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> 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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