[Ground-station] 2021 Retrospective - ORI

[Michelle Thompson]

2021 Retrospective - Open Research Institute, Inc.

Greeting all, and welcome to the close of 2021 at ORI.

For a high-level summary of what Open Research Institute is and what we
have been up to, please watch the very short video presented at Open Source
Cubesat Workshop 2021. The recording of the talk is here:
https://youtu.be/VG9-Mc1Hn4A

If you would like to keep up with what we do, then subscribing to our
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Join Phase 4 Ground Trello board:
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Here are our challenges and successes from the past year and what we’re
looking forward to in 2022. There’s a lot going on here and some of the
things we are facing are not fun. Some of the discussion is political and
tedious. We have some decisions that have been made and some big ones to
make for 2022 and beyond. Your opinions matter. Comment and critique
welcome and encouraged.

First and foremost, we thank the individuals and organizations that have
made our work possible. Funding comes from YASME Foundation, ARRL
Foundation, ARDC Foundation, Free Software Foundation, our
Trans-Ionospheric and JoCo Badge projects, proceeds from the Gold Medal
Ideas ORI store, and people like you.

We are on track and on budget in all projects for 2021, with a schedule
slip in Remote Lab East/South deployment. The overall effect of covid on
ORI has been minor, with the exception of parts supply issues. Everyone is
facing similar challenges with some parts simply not available.

Retrospective

We are a research institution. We are not a ham radio club. Our primary
focus is to carry out open source work for the amateur radio space and
terrestrial bands. We expect this work to be used by amateur radio groups
that execute and operate designs in space and on earth. This expectation
has not been met in some of the ways we anticipated, but we have a broad
path forward, a lot of things going very well, and we are going to take
full advantage of all the positive developments over the past year in every
way we can.

This next part is not the most fun story to write or read, but there’s a
lot of very good lessons learned here, and it needs to be put in one place
so that our amateur satellite volunteers know about it and can find it.

One can skip ahead to “Successes in 2021” further down the page to get
straight to technical progress.

When we say we expected our work to be used by amateur satellite groups, we
assumed this meant AMSAT. Primarily AMSAT-NA, but we are also here to serve
AMSAT-DL, AMSAT-UK, and so on. ORI is an AMSAT Member Society, and has
demonstrated preparation, enthusiasm, and experience through continued
contributions to the amateur satellite community. ORI volunteers have
professional, academic, and amateur experience with collectively at least a
couple dozen payloads in orbit, ranging from GEO commercial to LEO amateur.
A very large fraction of our volunteers are new to amateur radio. They have
never volunteered for AMSAT or any other legacy satellite group before.
Other volunteers have experience with AMSAT but no current role because of
the politics of AMSAT-NA GOLF. I can say without any reservation that there
is no loss of capability to any AMSAT organization from ORI activity. We
have always encouraged volunteering for and membership within whatever
AMSAT organization is nearest to you. It’s not just supportive words, but
actions as well. We have sold AMSAT-NA memberships at numerous events over
the years. We have actively promoted TAPR, AMSAT, ARRL, and other amateur
groups at every opportunity. We’ve happily worked with TAPR and ARRL to
great positive effect.

We have achieved some truly significant wins in the regulatory sphere with
ITAR/EAR and Debris Mitigation, have groundbreaking success in P4DX comms
development, and have one of the very few functional advanced
communications research remote access lab benches in existence. We have
expanded the AmbaSat Inspired Sensors project to move the AmbaSat to 70cm
in anticipation of sounding rocket and space tests, have fully supported
M17 Development and Deployment, and have proposed an employment program to
ARDC to directly confront the problem with open source burnout in DSP/FPGA
open source amateur designs.

We really do not suck.

However, despite all this good work, AMSAT-NA leadership, including senior
officers, have consistently and publicly described ORI as “grifters” and
“thieves” and “frauds”. Officers of AMSAT-NA have said we are “undeserving
of any community support” and have taken actions to try and make this
opinion a reality. It hasn’t worked, but these aggressively provocative and
negative public posts from AMSAT-NA officers and members about ORI are
clearly intended to harm. The attacks date back to 2018. ORI has not
responded to any of this. However, ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, and
participants in ORI need to know what’s being said and done.

ORI has had work censored from AMSAT publications and events. An ITAR/EAR
update article submitted in October 2021 was removed before publication.
According to the editor, this was the first time ever an article had been
censored in the AMSAT Journal. The article had been requested by the editor
and is in the draft of that issue of the Journal. It was personally
squashed by the AMSAT President after the draft Journal was sent out.
Several presentations and some papers were ordered to be eliminated at the
last minute from 2020 AMSAT Symposium. The work had been welcomed by the
submissions chair. This exclusion was unprecedented as well.

This sort of bizarre censorship has no place in amateur radio. Our
disappointment with these decisions has been communicated to the editor of
AMSAT Journal and the submissions chair for AMSAT Symposium.

For 2021, ORI co-hosted a half-day conference in collaboration with IEEE.
This Information Theory Space and Satellite Symposium was successful, got
great reviews, and IEEE has asked several times if ORI would be willing to
organize something like this again. This gave us a chance to present some
of the sort of work that we think should be part of AMSAT Symposium.

You can find the event recordings here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSfJ4B57S8DnhlrRya50IxGP90_uGpiho

Why do we care about any of this grumpy opposition? Why be concerned about
censorship from a relatively small event or newsletter?

Because AMSAT-NA is presumed to be the primary advocacy group for amateur
satellite activity in the United States. Because we want all AMSAT
organizations to be successful. Because AMSAT and ARISS-USA have claimed
that they are gatekeepers for amateur radio access to NASA. Because
AMSAT-NA currently controls access to things like IARU committees for
Region 2. Because AMSAT-NA gets irate when anyone else meets with the FCC
on behalf of the amateur satellite service, but will not present anything
outside of internal AMSAT-NA interests.

We care about this because ORI showed up and contributed within the AMSAT
framework in good faith.

AMSAT-NA is, to be blunt, supposed to help us do exactly what we are doing.
We are not a “threat”. We are not “thieves”. We are not “grifters”. We are
not “frauds”. We don’t “siphon technical members away”. We are not “an
embarrassment”. We deserve absolutely none of this sort of thing. We have
invited AMSAT-NA to participate in every single major endeavor that we have
carried out and accomplished. This inclusive and cooperative spirit has not
been reciprocated.

Tacit acceptance of this sort of behavior is the real embarrassment.

For 2022, we will (of course) continue to utilize the amateur radio bands.
All radio work will directly benefit amateur radio terrestrial and space.
There will be no loss of opportunities or restrictions of goals for
technical work. However, our associations and attention moving forward will
focus on communities and organizations that share basic values with ORI.
There will be some changes as we adapt, evolve, and grow. We can’t afford
to spend time trying to work with organizations completely out of step with
open source amateur satellite work, no matter how famous, wealthy, or
historical they happen to be.

Successes in 2021

There is a lot of good news here.

Both the San Diego Microwave Group and the San Bernardino Microwave Society
have been actively supportive and provided material assistance, volunteer
time, and expert advice that we simply would not have received anywhere
else. We would not have had a successful meeting with the FCC about Debris
Mitigation without the support from members of these two radio clubs.
Members generously offered their time, input, and guidance. All the
regulatory work can be found here:
https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/tree/master/Regulatory

Based on this meeting, we had a series of Orbit Workshops in November 2021.
Recordings posted to the debris mitigation channel on our Slack.

The ITAR CJ Request work was funded through a grant from ARDC. The EAR
Classification, successful Advisory Opinion Letter from Commerce, FAQ, and
“How to use this work” flow graph were paid for with a loan to ORI. The
process to fundraise to pay back this loan is underway. The final amount
for EAR/Advisory Opinion/FAQ/Flowgraph is $14,425.00 Similar to the ITAR CJ
Request work, this amount is substantially less than initial estimates.
Credit goes to excellent counsel at Thomsen and Burke LLP and a motivated
volunteer team at ORI that handled as many of the preparations as possible.
Active sustained involvement reduced costs and increased competence and
awareness of the many legal issues we were dealing with.

For 2022, we have two legal efforts that we are considering becoming
involved with. Fundraising for those efforts will happen in advance of the
work. This is a change from how we did the ITAR/EAR legal work, where
fundraising was done after the legal work was completed.

We would not have had a successful multi-media beacon demonstration without
support and advice from Kerry Banke and Ron Economos. A video presentation
of this work can be found at https://youtu.be/vjfRI1w_dSs?t=609 and
documentation can be found here:
https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/tree/master/Engineering/Transmitters/DVB-S2-Multimedia-Beacon

This work is presented as a terrestrial beacon, but is also the default
digital download for the P4DX transponder payload.

The payload work is currently focused on producing an FGPA-based end-to-end
over-the-air demonstration. There are multiple repositories. The best way
to get an overview of this work is either through the README.md files in
the repos at https://github.com/phase4ground and
https://github.com/phase4space.

If reviewing source code and block diagrams is not your thing, then watch
the introduction of this video: https://youtu.be/fCmzS6jBhHg followed by
the most recent Technical Advisory Committee meeting here:
https://youtu.be/V2BlIp7XYMM

Thomas Parry is the Primary Investigator and lead the TAC meeting. Wally
Ritchie (SK) was the previous and founding Primary Investigator, and he
presented the overview in the design review linked above.

P4DX is our digital multiplexing microwave amateur band transverter. The
native digital uplink is M17 FDMA and the downlink is TDM DVB-S2/X. A
high-level architectural paper can be found here:
https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/tree/master/Engineering/Requirements/Architecture

One of the current roadblocks with the end-to-end demo is a necessary
expansion of capability in Remote Labs West. In order to use the Analog
Devices ADRV9371 RFIC development board, we can get by with using an SD
card image in the FPGA development station. However, this requires a lot of
manual intervention, so booting the filesystem over NFS is an obvious
improvement. This turned out to be impossible because the kernel from
Analog Devices does not appear to support NFS. So, we’re fixing it and will
(assuming success) submit whatever capabilities we add to the kernel back
to Analog Devices. In the meantime, integration of the various bodies of
FGPA code continues. Immediately following the NFS boot addition is
DVB-S2/X verification station bring-up, in anticipation of being able to
test what comes out of the ADRV9371. That’s just one example of the type of
work that has had to happen all year in order to get things done.

Remote Labs have become much more than a “wear item” along the way. Once it
became clear that the internet-accessible lab benches had potential to
support a much wider variety of projects than just P4DX, volunteers started
putting time into making sure they were as easy to use as possible. You can
find out more about what Remote Labs are and how they work by going here:
https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/tree/master/Remote_Labs

Remote Labs East (Florida) equipment has been moved to Remote Labs South
(Arkansas). The move was necessary due to the untimely death of Wally
Ritchie in July 2021. The new site will need additional funding to complete
that Florida did not require. A grant application was made to ARDC in late
August 2021 for this work. Remote Labs South will also have additional
capabilities for bacteriophage and interferometry work. Both are open
source efforts.

There is a backup bridge funding plan to get the lab bench at Remote Lab
South operational. We can temporarily divert funds allocated to P4DX for
FPGA software licenses, as the floating license approach has worked out
well for us. The original budget planned for 10 node-locked licenses as
those were the type of licenses we have received as an organization in the
past. With only 1 floating license required for work so far, this leaves
some margin in the budget. This is enough margin to develop Remote Labs
South infrastructure while waiting for a response about funding from ARDC,
without further delaying deployment of this lab.

Remote Labs are a good example of the frugality, public science
orientation, and opportunistic spirit of ORI volunteers. We look forward to
many years of making the equipment available to the open source community.
We could use your help in spreading the word about this asset.

HamCation and Ham Expo have been invaluable. The staff and volunteers have
been friendly, supportive, and creative. We are looking forward to
HamCation 2022. If all goes well this will be our first in-person event
most of us have been able to attend in quite a while. We have a booth in
our usual spot. M17 Project and TAPR are on either side, and the large
Society for Amateur Radio Astronomy booth is on the other side of TAPR.
DATV is in the same row. ARRL will have a large presence. We have a lot of
forum time and plenty to talk about. Returning to in-person events is a big
step and there is extra stress, risk, and planning involved. If you are
willing to be part of HamCation, please get in touch and we will add you to
the planning spreadsheet and discussions.

IEEE Computer Society, Information Theory Society, and Signals and Systems
have been incredibly supportive. As mentioned above, in 2021, ORI co-hosted
a half-day conference in collaboration with IEEE. This Information Theory
Space and Satellite Symposium was successful, got great reviews, and IEEE
has asked several times if ORI would be willing to organize something like
this again.

You can find the event recordings here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSfJ4B57S8DnhlrRya50IxGP90_uGpiho

We have received a lot of positive feedback from IEEE section, region, and
national executive teams. The biggest challenge with IEEE is that they are
not the best or easiest way to publish open source or open access work.
They are honestly not set up for public access papers. IEEE is split
between academia and industry members, and that’s the constituencies more
or less served. Despite the big differences between a tiny open source
non-profit and a gigantic professional development organization, there is a
substantial amount of interaction and genuine mutual support. IEEE does not
exist without volunteers. Therefore, what we are doing is recognizable as a
thing of value by everyone in any role any of us comes into contact with.
We also benefited from having access to the salary survey results,
anonymized membership statistics, and a targeted member survey in order to
help construct the Engineers General grant proposals to ARDC. Is there a
possibility of funding through IEEE? Yes, although there are a lot of
limitations.

We have solid relationships with a number of Universities. Working with
academic institutions is not simple as a non-profit, but we have
transcended these difficulties several times and are part of the process of
getting space “done better” for students wherever we can. Our most recent
involvement is getting AmbaSat at 70cm, the DVB-S2/X microwave band work,
and M17 equipment on board sounding rockets and in the running on several
LEO platforms. Is there a possibility of funding through Universities?
Honestly, no. They expect funding from us, in order to do anything with us.
That is just the way the current engineering academy operates. Students are
not “free labor” now and never really have been in the past.

We have brought a small grant to a University, with the professor as the
Primary Investigator (AmbaSat Inspired Sensors). We would be willing to do
that again, if we were fortunate enough to get a professor of the same
motivation, experience, and availability, and fortunate enough to get
enough grant money to ensure student time. In general, the overhead
customarily demanded at a University, and the costs of getting significant
seat time from enough students, require much larger grants than we have
pursued to date. If you know of an opportunity or have an idea, get in
touch with ORI board and let’s see what we can achieve.

AmbaSat Inspired Sensors has redesigned the AmbaSat board to move from 915
MHz ISM LoRaWan to 70cm amateur radio satellite band. Thank you to Vidya
Gopalakrishna and Jay Francis for making this happen. LoRa with integration
to both SatNOGS and The Things Network through bridging is prototyping now.
The first hardware with the 70cm part has been received and works. There
were other changes to improve power and ground and routing. All of the
details can be found in the kicad-conversion branch at
https://github.com/phase4space/AmbaSat-1/tree/kicad_conversion/Release

This past year has been a significant step forward for the M17 Project. The
protocol has been strengthened, the number of development boards in the
community has increased, the amount of hardware that M17 can work on has
increased, and the lab on the East Coast of the US is moving forward. There
have been numerous successful public outreach efforts resulting in a steady
increase in name recognition, awareness of the communications mode, and
participation on the M17 Discord. A large amount of lab equipment has been
earmarked by ORI for M17. This purchase opportunity came from Open Lunar
Foundation and will put M17 lab into a highly capable category from the
start. All of us associated with M17 would like to recognize the OpenRTX
project. This team is a vital part of the M17 ecosystem and has done a
significant amount of highly technical work to enable M17 on the MD-380 HT.
OpenRTX has contributed a lot of engineering work, verification,
validation, and lab tests for M17.

https://m17project.org/

https://openrtx.org/#/

Open Lunar Foundation and ORI collaborated on an SBIR grant application for
funding targeting LunaNet in January 2021. While our application for
funding was not successful, the feedback from the reviewers was positive
and very constructive. The process for applying was clear, the technical
work in preparing the application lined up with all of ORI’s goals for
P4DX, and the teamwork with OLF was excellent.

https://www.openlunar.org/

We attempted to apply for a STTR with Tek Terrain LLC for opportunistic
positioning and ranging using LEO signals in mid-October 2021, but we were
not able to complete the application in time. We look forward to the next
opportunity to work with a for-profit on something like this, as there are
dozens of opportunities through a variety of government agencies for
research and development. This particular project would have put some
significant work into the public domain during Phase 1 of the grant.

We have an opening on our board of directors. Our co-founder Ben Hilburn
has stepped down from the board. Thank you very much to Ben for helping
found and build ORI. We welcome you to a (much less demanding) senior
advisor role.

If you have a recommendation for someone to invite, or you would like to
volunteer for this role, then get in touch to start the process. There are
a few IRS limitations on who can be on the board to prevent conflicts of
interest. No relatives of current board members, for example.

Current board is listed at:
https://www.openresearch.institute/board-of-directors/

Our open source workers/employment initiative is called Engineers General.
Two grant proposals were made to ARDC after a series of productive meetings
with their staff. The initiative got a lot of positive feedback. All of
ARDC’s feedback was incorporated into a set of revised grant requests that
were re-submitted in October 2021.

We have 6 additional resumes that have been submitted to us. We have
received a very large amount of interest in this initiative. Information
from IEEE salary surveys, informational interviews with open source
workers, and combing through peer reviewed papers resulted in the
hypothesis of Engineers General, and all of this information was
communicated to ARDC in support of the grant requests.

ORI board has the capacity, capability, and experience to manage contracted
workers, and there is a population of highly qualified people that want to
work in open source.

We do not have a timeline on when we will hear back from ARDC. P4DX took 11
months to approve. The ITAR legal work funding wasn’t pressing since the
funding application followed completion of the work. The AmbaSat Inspired
Sensors grant application was folded into P4DX at some point during its
review process.

Rent-a-GEO was submitted in October 2019, and there has not been a final
answer from ARDC about that proposal as of today. Rent-a-GEO is now down to
~2.5 years left on the offer of 5 years discounted rental of the
transponder. This is closer to 2 because the team assembled for Rent-a-GEO
would have to be rebuilt.

For those unfamiliar with this project proposal, it would enable a variety
of GEO development work over useful space channels with a footprint that
covers the continental United States. We did obtain a private pledge of
funding for the rental due to the urgency with the lifetime of the resource
coming to an end, and we have communicated this pledge of funding to the
vendor handling the transponder rental. However, there are substantial
contingencies with this funding source, and the vendor has a lot of
challenges that they are dealing with. Negotiations are slow. I’ll keep
working on this until EchoStar9 is turned off. In the meantime, we have had
a series of successful experiments in Europe.

We are headquartered in California, USA. According to Cal Non-Profits, a
501(c)(3) dedicated to helping California 501(c)(3)s, they really do not
know of any other organizations like ORI (or Open Lunar Foundation). We are
quite rare. The vast majority of non-profits in CA (and across the US) are
devoted to health and human services. Non-profits heavily dominate “last
mile” services delivery in the US, and there’s a wealth of information
about them and advice on how to operate. We have taken advantage of as much
as we can all the advice given by Cal Non-Profits, and will continue to
rely upon them for guidelines and checklists and statistics about the
non-profit sector.

Almost all of the science and technology non-profits are private
foundations. Almost all of the research institutes in this category have a
single very large source of money, have paid staff, and are clearly
dedicated to a mutually beneficial relationship with commercial consumers.
This is a very different way of operating from ORI, which is registered as
a public charity.

And, the way we have been funded directly impacts this status as a public
charity. 501(c)(3)s like ORI are required to have diverse funding. We have
to comply with what’s called a “public support test” that kicks in after
our fifth year of operation. We’ve been around three years and have two
more to go before this test is applied. While we did come very close to
passing this test in 2020, we will not pass it for 2021. The specific test
is that 33.3% of our funding must come from what are called public sources.
Technically this means at least 33.3% of donations must be given by donors
who give less than 2% of the nonprofit’s overall receipts. That 2% test
means that each non-profit’s donation numbers will be different, depending
on the overall receipts.

With ARDC being our primary funding source, all of the other sources
amounted to at most 30% in 2020. In 2021, the vast majority of funding came
from ARDC, putting the percentage from other sources down much further. A
quick calculation today shows other sources of funding coming in at most
24%. Given the 2% rule, that number is in reality lower.

If we had just one unusually large grant from ARDC in our financial
history, then that would be ok. The IRS lets you ignore one unusually large
grant. You can punch that one out of your public support test calculations.

One can argue that all of the money from ARDC should count as unusually
large, and all recipients out there doing tower trailers and buying
equipment for mesh networks and university club shacks shouldn’t have to
worry about this at all.

The amateur community has never sourced or sunk large amounts of money like
this. Hams have a reputation for being tight-fisted with money. Frugality
is a virtue that we ourselves value and employ, as described earlier in
this letter in the way we’ve extracted several “extra” features from the
P4DX grant money that a less motivated organization would not bother to do.

A step function of money of the magnitude that ARDC has, showing up in the
amateur radio community, cannot easily be matched or diluted. ARDC
principals have heard this from community members with philanthropic
experience from the get go.

For almost any amateur radio organization, outside of the very largest,
diverse sources of money on the order of an ARDC grant simply do not exist.
This means that ham non-profits can take one large grant from ARDC without
much trouble or effect on their status, but that’s it. The vast majority of
ham clubs and organizations file nothing more than a postcard with the IRS
every year. Above $50,000 in gross receipts and then they have to file the
full 990. A large influx of money on an ecosystem of organizations that
have never had access to it before includes both negative and positive
effects.

For organizations like ORI that fully intended to work with ARDC for the
long haul, this puts a huge additional fundraising burden on the
leadership. Since ORI has ruled out selling memberships, the fundraising
alternatives are even more challenging in an environment where a highly
successful ham club auction raises $400.

So what happens when your public charity fails the public support test?
Well, actually, nothing too horrible, but only if you are prepared for it.
You are, after a process that does have a subjective component, converted
from a public charity to a private foundation. The downside is that you
have to re-file all your taxes as a private foundation going back all five
years. There are some upsides. Private foundations do not have to follow
some of the rules that public charities are required to comply with.

As soon as we figured out we were well on our way to being converted into a
private foundation, which was mid-May 2021, we told ARDC. This was “news to
them”. After talking it over with ARDC staff, we then hired a non-profit
law specialist for advice (at ORI expense), wrote everything down, and came
up with a plan. ARDC could either fund ARDC service programs that ORI would
execute, and it would not “count against us”, or ORI could simply plan on
becoming a Private Operating Foundation associated with ARDC. These options
were proposed to ARDC staff. There was email back and forth and several
zoom calls. The answer was eventually “no” on ARDC running Service
Programs, but “yes” on ORI becoming a Private Operating Foundation
associated with ARDC.

Problem solved! We had a party to celebrate. The feelings of IRS doom are
kind of a big deal for a relatively new non-profit. We viewed this as being
“hired”, in a way, by ARDC.

This solution held until October 2021. It was no longer clear that ARDC
wanted this type of relationship. Both the “run Service Programs that ORI
executes” approach and the “Private Operating Foundation associated with
ARDC” approaches require a lot of communication and work. ARDC was not set
up for either of these solutions. ARDC operates very differently from ORI.
It does not have the same management structure or style, and it does not
communicate like we do. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t “impedance
match” to make up for these differences. It’s unreasonable to expect them
to change.

So, in November of 2021, the board of ORI and other senior advisers with
non-profit and foundation experience recommended reversing the “conversion
plan”. This means raising enough money to bring the ratio back up above the
public support test limit to stay a 501(c)(3). The fundraising goal, as of
today, is $150,000. This money has to come from diverse and much smaller
sources. This must be raised over the next two years. It will be
substantially more administrative and executive work to remain independent,
but it’s how we were founded and how we have operated all along. The path
forward is clear enough. The series of decisions during this process took a
large amount of time and energy from May until November, but it was well
worth the effort. Decisions about what type of non-profit organization ORI
is or becomes have enormous impact on what we do and how well we are able
to do it.

$150,000 (or more) is a large amount of money to raise in small amounts,
especially within the amateur radio community. Have some advice? Want to
get involved raising the money? Have another solution? Welcome aboard.

The fact that we exist and are successful in amateur radio communications
R&D is very unusual. This means that we are vulnerable and it means we have
more work to do, every year, to remain operational. Your support is vital
for success.

Thank you to everyone that is pulling for us to succeed! We are looking
forward to 2022 and welcome your ideas, time, talent, treasure, and advice.

-Michelle W5NYV
CEO ORI
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