[Ground-station] DEFCON31 Poster Session - CFP, 4th anniversary and strategy review, and thanks

[Michelle Thompson]

Do you have a poster that you can share at our open source showcase at RF
Village at DEFCON31? + current poster roundup

Do you have work you want to present at DEFCON? Open Research Institute
will have their second annual technical poster session in RF Village at the
Open Source Showcase.

Have a draft? Send it. Need help with creating one? Ask for it.

Free poster printing compliments of Paul KB5MU. Special thanks to DEFCON
organizing team, vendor support, the state of Nevada, and RF Village staff
for making the showcase + sales possible.

Here's the roundup of all the potential poster work I know about to date:

1) There's at least one poster from RFBitBanger. There's a really neat
diagram from Dr. Marks (project lead) which shows the iambic keyer firmware
logic. I'm planning on bringing this poster to the IMS2023 Amateur Radio
Social as well. I expect a lot of interest and feedback about the design
from the mostly academic IEEE crowd at the social. Iambic keyers are not
easy to implement well and are an excellent way to teach a variety of
things about timing-sensitive designs. The board design and new HF protocol
from Dr. Marks could easily be posters too.

2) I'd like to have a poster about our HF antenna implementation of a
classic and under-appreciated high radiation resistance design. We really
need to have a physical demo of this antenna as well. If you enjoy building
antennas, then get in touch.

Samundra Haque and a small team in Washington DC were working on this until
two weeks before the deadline for a NASA SBIR grant in mid-March. I decided
to wave off the grant application rather than submit something without a
fully active team, but I kept communicating with the grant support team at
NASA. We got some very valuable and positive feedback from NASA.

This development does expose a weakness of open source and volunteer teams.
When you suddenly lose a key person without any explanation, which does
happen regularly within traditional open source teams, you have to react
rapidly.

We have a willing manufacturing/SBIR partner for this antenna, a model in
MATLAB that shows that the antenna design works, three physical
implementations in the literature of the antenna working, and photographs
of a recent physical implementation from Samundra et al. This design gives
us a decent shot at a solid product that can help fund volunteer projects
at ORI. Publicity of the effort is going to be key, and posters are part of
the landscape. We got a lot of traction with our ITAR/EAR regulatory relief
summary, for example.

This project needs a name, so if you have any suggestions please suggest
them.

Projects like this that can potentially produce funding are critical to our
survival given the targeted harassment of ORI from ARDC. ARDC brags about
their official policy of excluding grant applications from ORI. ARDC has
deliberately interfered with ORI projects.

Since we recently concluded our 4th anniversary celebration, I'm going to
summarize how we've been treated over the past year, how that relates to
our corporate values and ethics, and how we moved forward.

Last year, ARDC deleted the original Great Scott Gadgets open source test
equipment grant (made with ORI, not TAPR). ARDC told Michael Ossmann that
he couldn't use ORI as a fiscal sponsor and that he couldn't use ORI as
even a technical partner. ARDC then assigned TAPR as the fiscal sponsor.
The review team never saw the GSG-ORI grant application.

This backroom decision was communicated in writing in an email that Michael
shared with ORI. Since ORI volunteers had participated in reviewing and
improving the grant application, we understood it clearly, and the ORI
board was enthusiastically invested in the project, ORI offered to move
forward with GSG with SBIR/STTR/IEEE/NSF Pose grants instead. We thought it
was a great partnership and would result in more money for GSG over time
than what was being requested from ARDC.

Michael Ossmann indicated he wanted to do this. We proceeded with all of
the additional grants.gov paperwork required and began regularly scouring
the database for grant opportunities.

However, Michael had already privately accepted the ARDC money. He didn't
inform anyone at ORI that he had done so. We spent the next six months
working on grants for this project. Michael was uncharacteristically
passive about all of this, but we had a plan and we stuck to it.

TAPR knew we had applied to ARDC with this grant because I told Scotty
Cowling about it before it was submitted, I had extended an invitation for
TAPR to be involved if the grant was successful. I've been a TAPR member
for a very long time, presented multiple times at DCC, and helped as a
volunteer in many ways. Transparency and inclusion is what we do, and we
did it for this project. We wanted the broadest possible benefit to the
most number of people, including TAPR.

To our disappointment, TAPR did not include ORI in any way when ARDC
targeted the ORI-GSG grant application for destruction and then assigned
the GSG grant to TAPR. Previous successful collaboration and coordination
between ORI and TAPR about SatNOGS kits, multiple HamCation exhibits and
forums, and TangerineSDR didn't seem to make any difference at all.

This was quite the lesson for us. We simply do not operate like this. It's
increasingly clear we have nearly nothing in common in terms of ethics or
values with these organizations and companies. We simply do not do and will
never do this sort of thing in reverse.

A second example is one previously described, where ARDC "pulled M17
Project aside" and told Ed Wilson that M17 could have an additional
$250,000 (with $80,000 on the existing grant still unspent) if they simply
dumped ORI and let ARDC choose another fiscal sponsor. This interference
came along with a lie that we were in trouble with the IRS and couldn't
accept any money. This is flatly and completely untrue, but most of M17
leadership did fall in love with the idea of even more money. Neither M17
or ARDC cared about the excellent performance from ORI. It did not matter
how good a job we had done.

A third example is ARDC deleting Remote Labs development grants before they
got to the review committee.This was harmful but we did recover.

There's more. If you wish to see it all, please contact Steve Conklin, our
CFO, and he will walk you through it all. steve at conklinhouse.com

What does this mean? ARDC does not want ORI to be successful in amateur
radio and will do what they can to make sure ORI has a hard time.

We have no idea why. We've asked multiple times why. There has been no
explanation except additional threats and insults from Bdale Garbee, Phil
Karn, Rosy Wolfe (now Schnecter), and Bob McGwier and some speculation on
our part.

The vast amount of money ARDC extracted from the 44 block sale has been
dangled in front of inexperienced project leads in order to get to
predetermined outcomes that maximize harm to ORI and a few other
organizations. While this sort of behavior happens in the corporate VC
startup scene, I really don't think it belongs in a very small technical
hobby community like amateur radio.

This is not at all what we were hoping would happen in amateur radio with
this windfall, but it has happened, with a decidedly mean-spirited
impunity. The behavior will probably continue, is not limited to ORI, and
has driven off a number of highly competent technical people. It's very
likely that there is a lot of damage that we're simply unaware of.

Thank you to the ORI board for attempting to respond to and defend against
this very difficult set of challenges over the past year. It's incredibly
hard to start a new organization from the ground up and be treated this way
by incumbents and super-wealthy "foundations". If you are reading this,
then know that community members like you are the biggest reason for
persevering, reinventing, adapting, and continuing.

If we want to stay in amateur radio at all, then unwelcome and unwanted
burdens have to continue to be offset by our own initiative. We have no
control over what bad actors do. We have immense control over how we
respond.

If we continue to pull together, and continue to guard against
interference, then we will continue to succeed. New projects like the HF
antenna (and Neptune, RFBitBanger, Haifuraiya, Opulent Voice, Ribbit,
AmbaSat Respin, and more) show we're competent, effective, and appreciated
by a growing, diverse, and truly remarkable community.

We will not be abandoning our transparent, inclusive, and collaborative
approach.

So, I can put together a poster about this antenna design, but we need more
people on this one to build prototypes and make progress towards a Phase 1
grant to fund test and manufacture. It really is a fun and effective
design. It's timely considering how space constrained so many homes are
these days, and how grumpy people get about towers. If you could have a
small antenna design for 160m that was essentially invisible from a
suburban street, would you get active on that band?

3) The "upper" protocol layers for Opulent Voice, our high-bitrate digital
voice/data satellite uplink design, have been added. A poster would be a
great idea to communicate how Opulent Voice has evolved. I believe the
prototype implementation is a day or so away from being published. This is
a huge step forward and very exciting. There is nothing like this anywhere
else in amateur radio. This is not warmed-over P25. The voice mode sounds
incredible and it does not require a separate clunky packet data mode.

4) Ribbit's poster from last year at DEFCON30 was one of the most popular,
and for good reason. Ribbit has continued to advance, will get some very
useful field testing this summer, has multiple potential CubeSat deployment
opportunities, and is looking for additional app designers. A poster
summarizing the progress and clearly stating the needs would be very
popular. This is a poster that could also be shown at IMS2023 in June.

5) Remote Labs organization and services - especially the changes that are
coming based on what we learned from our HDL Coder for Software Defined
Radio class from Mathworks, held 1-5 May 2023.

The timing is not great for Neptune (OFDM low latency digital mode for
aerospace) and our two sounding rocket efforts, but we expect posters from
those projects too. Posters may just not be ready by August 2023.

Your opinions and feedback on how to best show our work are appreciated,
listened to, and acted upon. We are committed to lifting up ambitious open
source digital radio work, collaborating with like-minded organizations,
and making it possible for anyone willing to learn to fully participate in
wireless digital communications.

Thank you,
-Michelle Thompson
858 229 3399 text welcome
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