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

[Robert McGwier]

This is correct because the university treadmill means students are not
allowed under the auspices of the universiy to function without a faculty
sponsor or mentor and that faculty is controlled by the university through
the use of funding and research credit. It is just the way it is.


Dr. Robert W McGwier, Ph.D.
Adjunct Faculty, Virginia Tech
ARDC Member of Board
N4HY: ARRL, TAPR, AMSAT, EARC
Sky: AAVSO, SkyHub, Auburn AS, Skyscrapers

On Wed, Apr 7, 2021, 1:55 PM Michelle Thompson via Ground-Station
<ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute> wrote:

> 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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