[Ground-station] MUD 2024 - call for speaker support and advice

[Michelle Thompson]

Greetings all,

I was approached by several folks to submit something about ORI work to MUD
2024, which will be in Vancouver, Canada in early October. They were all
very convincing and very complimentary about what we do and they all wanted
us to get more visibility.

*Thank you* to those that encouraged this! It would be so nice to come back
to MUD, where ORI demonstrated working 122 GHz circuits very early on, and
this had a large positive effect on band kits. I have presented about 3d
printing in general, 3d printed 10 GHz horns, and 122 GHz metallized
antennas in the past. I had a follow up article just last year on PLA model
3d printed prototypes, and how they deteriorate.

We followed through for 2024, and submitted a technical program summary of
all our microwave band projects.

After some back and forth, we have a slot.

However, the feedback was "I would hope that it is not just a "sales pitch"
for the ORI" and "That Neptune YouTube presentation is NOT something I
would want you to present at MUD ! Hopefully much higher level" with a
laughing emoji, and "Haifuraiya sounds interesting....Ribbet not really"
(They meant Ribbit).

I was confused by this, and a bit disappointed. Our recent Neptune videos
include a high level summary of the project from Leonard Dieguez, and a
slow walk-through of the Simulink model and HDL creation from the technical
team. I'm not sure how much slower or simplified we can make this stuff. It
isn't easy work, but it is explainable. Our YouTube videos wouldn't be
duplicated as a presentation in person, but the work captured in those
videos would be referenced and highlighted in a technical overview.

Ribbit has *demonstrated* success on VHF/UHF/microwave bands with
significant humanitarian and emergency communications applications on three
continents. It is one of the first amateur radio applications using Polar
Codes. It won the 2023 ARRL Technical Innovation Award.

And it's "Not really" interesting?

The rest of 2024 MUD lineup better be more impressive than Ribbit, in order
to justify this three-word toss-off of a submission review.

The "sales pitch" question really stood out to me.

At MUDs dating back to 2010, I've sat through what can only be
described "sales pitches" for DSES, AREDN, microwave contesting clubs,
SBMS, 50MHz and Up, North Texas Microwave Group, and many other projects
and groups, some of which are no longer active.

I did not mind this *at all* because these projects and organizations are
part of the community and doing good stuff. How else are they going to get
the word out? (How else would we?)

Our submission was technical in nature. It did not include an
organizational promotion "sales pitch" component. I mean, we have to
explain who we are when we give a presentation, but we're not "sales
pitching" anyone when we do this.

Even if it was some sort of "sales pitch" (which I interpreted to be "bad"
and not "good" from the email), a "sales pitch" would actually fit in with
many other MUD talks in the past.

Maybe this is a recent change at MUD, where promoting clubs and
organizations is discouraged, I don't know? Can anyone give some advice
here, who is more of a "member" of MUD?

I replied to the questions about the submission that we don't do "sales",
don't have paid memberships, and we give away everything we do for free.
This got an acknowledgement, but took more communications to get a rather
tepid go-ahead.

Given the unexpected extra scrutiny and emoji giggle about our work, I
think that those of us drawing up presentations could use some help here
with reviewing potential presentations for this community. Laughing is
really not what I want to get in response to a (volunteer, self funded)
talk submission. When we present, we want it to be really good.

So, please be ready to help impedance match what we do to Microwave Update.
I know a lot of people on this list have been in the past and are familiar
with the type of work that is presented at MUD. Just tell us how it really
is.

Also, we don't have to continue with the talk/presentation. There's also
the proceedings, where we can submit a paper and slides and not have to
work so hard to tailor a live presentation. If we don't fit into the talk
line-up, then we don't fit in.

I trust our community members to help figure this out. For example, if we
are talking to a community that literally does not know what OFDM is (is
that the case?), then I think we have to start from there?

Can we make this a fun event for us by carefully tailoring the
presentation? I really do not want it to end up as a slog or chore, where
after a bunch of work and expensive travel we're ridiculed for being "too
technical" for amateur radio or get weird or abusive interactions at our
booth, like what happened at Hamvention and Hamcation from AMSAT, ARDC, and
ATV.

Talking about how totally cool OFDM is, is most of a speaking slot alone,
and that doesn't even get to the good stuff that is brought to bear in
Neptune. Let alone the polyphase filter and DVB-S2 encoder work in
Haifuraiya, which we also wanted to bring. Should we simply do a talk on
the basics of OFDM and multirate?

The event isn't until early October 2024, but it will be here before we
know it.

I asked about a demonstration room and have not heard back about that yet.
Over the air public demonstrations are our (very strong) preference, for a
variety of reasons. The most important of which is that no one can really
argue with a recorded demo of working code or circuits, and working links
delight everyone that loves radio. Maybe we just ask for a bunch of tables
in the demo room and that's where we share our work?

If we need to simply wait until we have something that can be bought by
non-technical people commercially off the shelf, then we should consider
halting participation in all these ham events on all these continents all
together. Is it really the case that the "average ham" only cares about
what they can buy and put on the air as an appliance? If this "average ham"
is the true constituency of ham radio technical conferences, then we're
showing up with our work too early and caring too much about what is a huge
mismatch in expectations.

We do not have any of these issues with DEFCON RF/Aerospace Village
participation. We have speaking slots available to us, and a generous
amount of free floor space for demonstrations. The 5,000 or so folks that
come through the RF Village are technical, receptive to our technical work,
and provide a lot of feedback and constructive criticism. The review
process for talks is rigorous and the detailed feedback from the organizers
is specific to the submission. I've never felt like we don't belong there.
I'd really like to feel like we can belong at a conference like MUD as
well.

I look forward to your opinions and advice, either on this thread or
privately expressed to me or any other ORI board member.

https://www.openresearch.institute/board-of-directors/

-Michelle Thompson
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