[Ground-station] Question for ORI:

[Bruce Perens]

Pretty much all of the small satellite groups are interested in LORA and
are telegraphing future missions, and we have the FossaSAT-1 mission, which
although incorrectly implemented (and the firmware was not updatable) they
claim to have received LORA packets.

The sole advantage of LORA is that there are cheap chips available. As
we've heard, it doesn't have the best data link performance. The problem
for us is these two patents: US7791415
<https://patents.google.com/patent/US7791415>, EP2763321
<https://patents.google.com/patent/EP2763321A1>. They place all of our
non-Semtech implementations in danger, and Pierros recently mentioned that
Semtech doesn't respond when asked about them.

If I had my 'druthers, someone more skilled than me would be sitting down
to make an open data link implementation built on some cheap microprocessor
and we would not have to deal with those folks and their patents.

I suggest that this be an experimental pathfinder on some future satellite,
not part of the main mission. Fly the Semtech chip and do a better
implementation than the FossaSAT folks, and see what you can get out of it.
After that, a greater effort might be justified.

    Thanks

    Bruce

    Thanks

    Bruce

On Wed, Mar 31, 2021 at 1:13 PM Michelle Thompson via Ground-Station
<ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute> wrote:

> A question has been posed:
>
> "NASA wants to commercialize TDRS and the private sector is working on
> making Ku and Ka band terrestrial links usable in space. This only works to
> the advantage of big players that can close these links (NRO, NASA, etc)
> and leaves it out of reach from hobby folks. The barrier to entry and
> complexity are rather large (I'm working with SCaN and APL on some of this
> at work).
>
> https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-r/oth/0c/0a/R0C0A00000D0017PDFE.pdf
>
> Long story short, I think society needs to do this for LORA. Imagine,
> having a cubesat that can ping Swarm with "I'm alive" and also get two way
> messaging for TT&C/Health/Whatevs. Apparently, there is a regulatory
> distinction between Earth-Space and Space-Space and folks are trying to be
> sneaky in allowing dual use for only a few bands. Even if your satellite
> lost attitude control, the nature of VHF/UHF would allow you to phone back
> home from space via an in space LORA network and potentially help you
> recover your satellite.
>
> My original work was for Iridium in terms of using Commercial networks on
> cubesats and then expanded to broader networks but in terms of SWAP, LORA
> and SWARM are better and I'm including them in a smallsat paper this year.
>
> https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7500525
> https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4839583
>
> Do you think this is dumb? That would be question 1 :)
>
> And if not, does Open Research have anyone that knows how to navigate the
> regulatory bits to make LORA usable as an inter satellite relay? I'm
> willing to put in all the work needed but how to write a letter to the FCC
> requires finesse and sneaking into these regulatory chats is rough. You can
> probably accomplish using the network with an experimental license but
> permanent regulatory authority would make things easier to proliferate."
>
> -Michelle W5NYV
>
>
>

-- 
Bruce Perens - CEO at stealth startup. I'll tell you what it is eventually
:-)
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