[Ground-station] Introducing Pierre W4CKX

[Michelle Thompson]

Greetings all!

I'd like to introduce Pierre and his work. Please join me in welcoming him
here. If you are interested in what Pierre has in mind, please join him on
the #ribbit channel on Slack. And, look for work to show up in GitHub.



My name is Pierre Deliou.

I am happy to join the ORI team.

I came back to the Ham hobby in 2020 as W4CKX and I am in my early 40s. I
was first licensed as F4CKX during my university years in France where I
graduated with a Bachelor's in physics and a Master's in aeronautical
manufacturing.

I stopped Ham Radio within 1 year of my license. After my studies in
France, I did some research at GaTech in Atlanta where I met my wife. After
living in Paris for a while, we moved permanently to the Atlanta area 15
years ago.

Coming back to Ham Radio after 23 years, I am very surprised by the state
of the hobby.

Some areas have been thriving by leveraging the three drivers of innovation
(compute power, memory, and touch screens). For example HF is embracing SDR
transceivers with touchscreen interfaces) FT8 is leveraging compute power
for encoding and decoding weak signals.

However VHF/UHF hasn't seen the same level of progress, where some HT today
still have 7 segment displays, and 25 year old digital voice technology
with no use of memory or compute power.

This is problematic because VHF/UHF HT are the entry point to the hobby for
a new Ham, and it looks antiquated compared to the performance of modern
smartphones.

This led me to a deep reflection on how to change things for the VHF/UHF
spectrum.

I spent one full year refining my thoughts and shaping a vision, building
on my 10+ years of reflections on Emergency Communications.

A vision designed to embrace and enhance all aspects of the hobby in the
VHF/UHF spectrum. It is not designed to be in competition with past and
existing modes, it is designed with the human at the center, as individual
and in groups to transform the user experience and radically modernize the
Ham capabilities for fun and for disaster communications while being 100%
backwards compatible with equipment every Ham already have: one simple HT
and one smartphone.

This vision leverages the large memory, strong compute power, and
touchscreen interface of the smartphone. It's a leap forward for VHF/UHF
Ham radio. It's a messaging network working in a hybrid way across radio
link and cellular connectivity.

It looks and feels like a blend of Twitter and Reddit running in
distributed fashion over repeater servers with massive redundancy which can
operate independently of the Internet during a disaster if cellular is
down. I named it "Ribbit"

Radio operation and decentralized communications are rewarded on the
platform.

By daily use of the service for all Ham related activities, one has the
instant confirmation that the radio network is operational. By transmitting
radio packets to the network, once per week (for disaster groups) or once
per month (regular Hams), one is practicing the exact habits to communicate
effectively in an emergency.

I want to thank you for having read my introduction.

As a next step, under the advice of Michelle, I am working on a scientific
poster to explain the network architecture.

It will be followed by a white paper which will explain the benefits of the
platform.

With two young kids and a full time job, this will take me some time to
publish both so I thank you in advance for your patience.

I am dedicated to the vision and stand ready to support its advancement for
the next decade.

Let's get started!!

Pierre - W4CKX
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