[Ground-station] Opulent Voice: on a sounding rocket

[Michelle Thompson]

We are at the point where we need to start writing down size, power, and
weight budgets for the Opulent Voice sounding rocket design. This is with
UPR.

Frequencies and link budgets will be needed very shortly, too.

This is for 2023, but we do not have a lot of time to spare - especially
given continuing supply chain issues that have affected all of our projects
to some degree, some more than others.

The prototype work going on right now targets a HackRF for the SDR, with
one of a very few remaining microcontrollers for the mod/demod code. Or, a
B210.

Is there anything else that anyone can think of that would be a better
choice? This communications link supports the sounding rocket
science mission, as well as demonstrating an open source layered digital
protocol.

We want a 5 GHz uplink, but we can put this on another frequency if we have
to. We do have a lot of surplus parts support from SBMS.

We do have plenty of power at a nominal 28 volts. We have at most 7 lbs
allocated for everything we'd build. They'd really like us to weigh 5 lbs
or less.

Frequency drives the antenna, so we need to nail down a 5 GHz decision or
pick something else, as soon as possible. We do not fit on VHF/UHF with the
higher bitrate. There's an amateur allocation at 900 MHz, we still have use
at 3 GHz.

Please think these things over and share your views. We have excellent
support from the university and we are expected to mentor the students, who
will be doing the work. My goal is to have a lot to teach them that we
all have learned from a working Opulent Voice prototype, with over the air
results and metrics.

Here's the working document for Opulent Voice:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vmOwcjmGKwMgAqcdLQ-7zk8PMv6MAcV1hhGDVRyijsQ/edit?usp=sharing

Here's the repository with the (in progress) mod/demod codebase:

https://github.com/phase4ground/opv-cxx-demod

-Michelle Thompson
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