[Ground-station] HamCation 2022 Report

[Michelle Thompson]

 HamCation 2022 Report

Paul Williamson (Remote Labs), Douglas Quagliana (P4DX), Michelle Thompson
(ORI), Ed Wilson (M17), and Steve Miller (M17) represented the breadth of
projects from Open Research Institute at HamCation 2022.

ORI's "Tonight's The Night: SDRs are HOT" booth made its first appearance
in nearly two years. Available at the booth were stickers, pins, patches,
shirts, consulting, and project updates. ORI's "extra chair" seating area
was appreciated by volunteers and visitors alike. Booth visitors heard
about the successful DVB-S2X modem work from ORI and progress on the
end-to-end demo of the entire satellite transponder chain. At Open Research
Institute, it doesn't work until it works over the air. Due to the efforts
of a truly wonderful international open source team, the custom FPGA code
is coming together very well, and Remote Labs continues to evolve. The
Phase 4 Digital Multiplexing Transceiver project is on budget, on track,
and highly likely to succeed. The return on investment is high. The team
isn't anywhere near done innovating, publishing, and enabling high-tech
space aand terrestrial amateur radio work. If you want to be a part of
this, or just follow along, visit https://openresearch.institute, go to
"Getting Started", and sign up for the Phase 4 Ground mailing list. This is
"home base" for announcements from ORI.

Right beside ORI's booth was the "future of amateur radio", the M17
Project. Ed and Steve from M17 brought working hardware, firmware updates,
and also demonstrated several different software implementations throughout
the weekend. M17 held their weekly net on Friday live from the booth, gave
away stickers, magnets, and pins, and captured the hearts of all who
visited. You can get involved with this project at https://m17project.org

AmbaSat re-spin was a frequent topic of conversation. The five AmbaSat
boards from ORI, which operate at 70cm, have been distributed to the
firmware team, and they have begun development and are seeing success in
university and hobbyist labs. The goal is to create a compelling
application, put the hardware on a sounding rocket, apply for a launch
license, and send this project to space in a way that makes the amateur
community proud. While "AmbaSat Inspired Sensors" is ORI's smallest
received grant, it has by far the highest capability return on investment
of any ORI project.


ORI and M17 booths were located in the North Hall. While the other
buildings are larger and many consider them to be higher profile, booths in
the North building are what you must walk by to get to the Information
Booth and Prize Booth. Since the vast majority of participants visit this
part of the show, it is, in our humble opinion, the best possible location.

Michelle Thompson (W5NYV) presented about Digital Communications Technology
at the ARRL Expo Technology Track held on Thursday at a conference center
near Seaworld. There were four tracks of presentations at the Expo:
Contesting, Handbook, Technology, and Emergency Communications.

Michelle reported a positive, enthusiastic, and engaged audience for her
ARRL Technology Track talk, and has high hopes that ARRL will continue
doing events like this moving forward. She discussed ORI's Polar Code
initiative, successful regulatory and legal work, why open source LDPC work
is so important to amateur radio, the four fundamental components to
digital communications, and why the M17 protocol was selected as ORI's
satellite uplink protocol for the P4DX transponder project. Michelle
invited M17 principals to speak about their work, and opened the floor for
questions and comments from the many highly competent and curious technical
hams that were in attendance. Subjects covered ranged from asynchronous
computing to concatenated coding. The rumors about toilet paper being a
fundamentally important part of this presentation are entirely true.


ORI organized a Friday forum track for Clearspan Tent #1 that ran from
11:15am until closing. HamCation was extremely generous in giving us time
to present work from a wide variety of people. Here's our lineup for 2022.

11:15 am
Understanding and Changing Amateur Radio Regulation / Open Source Digital
HTs are Real! by Bruce Perens (K6BP)


12:30 pm TAPR - TangerineSDR Update, or How to build an SDR without any
parts by

Scotty Cowling (WA2DFI)


1:45 pm M17 Project by Ed Wilson, Steve Miller (N2XDD, KC1AWV)

3:00 pm GNU Radio work at ORI / FreeDV HF Voice Update 2022 by Douglas
Quagliana, Mel Whitten (KA2UPW, K0PFX)

3:00 pm Society of Amateur Radio Astronomy SARA by Tom Crowley (KT4XN)

At both the Expo and HamCation, ARRL set the pace this year for satellite
talks and satellite demonstrations, with a video (please see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhyUbC_o1JM&ab_channel=ARRLHQ) providing
practical examples of amateur satellite operations. Patrick Stoddard
(WD9EWK) gave a tutorial on satellite operations at the ARRL Expo in the
Handbook Track. Amateur satellite was very well supported from ARRL this
year, and we have heard this will continue to strengthen going forward.

With some optimism, ORI looks forward to returning to in-person events. The
next planned in-person event is DEFCON (https://defcon.org/). Last year,
DEFCON was held in person. Proof of vaccination was required. Masks were
required. It was a highly successful and enjoyable event. This year, for
2022, ORI will be represented in DEFCON villages and activities. We are
looking at applying for M17 to be part of Demo Labs, multiple radio links
between villages to demonstrate a wide variety of technology, and
presentations about the R&D that we do.

If you would like to be a part of this, and we do need you, then please
join the Slack channel for DEFCON planning. Quite a bit of work is underway
already. The goal for DEFCON 2022 is over the air demonstrations, outreach,
fun, swag, and supporting our friends at all the villages we've been
involved with over the years.

DEFCON is run very differently from traditional amateur radio conventions.
The most significant practical difference is that DEFCON has a written code
of conduct, and those written community standards and policies are
enforced. It has a very diverse and very interdisciplinary attendance.
Unlike many technical or hobby conferences, participation in the DEFCON
community is possible year-round through participation in local groups that
meet monthly.

DEFCON is a very large event, with attendance of over 30,000.

DEFCON is devoted to a very broad spectrum of experimental, commercial, and
open source work. Participation by the government, industrial, information
security, hacker, hobbyist, and scientific communities has steadily grown
over the past 30 years.

The next virtual event for Open Research Institute is Ham Expo, 12-13 March
2022. Andre Suoto will have an excellent talk about our open source LDPC
encoder for FPGAs and ASICs. This is in the main track. We will have a wide
variety of work and projects represented at our booth, which is in the
vendor hall. Open Research Institute is a non-profit sponsor of Ham Expo.
We'll have friendly and accessible "office hours" during the event.
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