[Ground-station] HamCation 2023 - update and *call for volunteers*

[Michelle Thompson]

Greetings all!

If you are not familiar with the US amateur radio vendor fair
HamCation, then please visit https://www.hamcation.com/

ORI has a booth in a very nice location right in front of the prize
drawing area.

We have shown at HamCation for many years. In the past, we've
collaborated with and supported exhibits and presentations from
Society of Amateur Radio Astronomy (SARA), Tucson Amateur Packet Radio
(TAPR), M17, DEFCON, GNU Radio, SBMS Beacon Project, and more.

We've organized four all-day forum sessions, recruited talks from all
over the world, and welcomed people and projects that needed space to
present their efforts to the large crowd in Orlando, FL. We've done a
lot of demos, given out thousands of dollars of prizes and swag, and
hosted several contests. The organizers have been deeply appreciative
and delight to work with.

Aside from ARRL, ORI has fielded the most diverse and successful set
of exhibits at HamCation in recent history.

It's not a bad hamfest, as ham events go. Out of all of the ones in
the US, this has been the best one for us.

Our plans were to show the Versatune project, which is a fantastic
upgrade to a beloved ham DVB product, show Ribbit and Rattlegram,
demonstrate Haifuraiya satellite work, introduce our sounding rocket
work, and more.

Ribbit project team members cannot attend due to work and time
conflicts. We'll show through IEEE and potentially at Ham Expo.

Versatune has run into insurmountable delays and supply chain issues
with Raspberry Pis. We looked at every possible alternative to get
Versatune done faster with alternate parts, including rewriting the
codebase for some very different off-the-reel parts that were
available. We decided this was not a reasonable or achievable course
of action. The original design is excellent and making progress - just
not fast enough to show at HamCation in February 2023.

Haifuraiya (Open source HEO/GEO satellite) will show at QSO Today Ham
Expo in March and through IEEE.

Sounding Rocket students cannot afford to come to HamCation, and we
have similar supply chain problems there with Opulent Voice.

So - What do we have at HamCation?

We have a four-bedroom AirBNB very close to the fairgrounds reserved.
Each room has a king sized bed. It has a large kitchen and very nice
living room.

We have a booth at HamCation that is now completely open for anyone
from ORI to use. I will do anything I can to help you showcase our
work at HamCation. Do a shift at the booth, enjoy the very nice house,
and promote our work.

More about this will be on Slack in the Hamcation channel.

Get in touch with me (cell phone number below) to take advantage.
Deadline is 1 February.

If we have no staff, then we cancel and attempt to get the money back
or donate the housing and booth space to a worthy group.

Please forward to anyone you think might be interested. What sort of
work do we support? It's outlined here:
https://www.openresearch.institute/your-project-is-welcome/

-Michelle Thompson
(858) 229 3399