ORI participated in the futureGEO Community Workshop at HAMRADIO 2026. Held annually in Friedrichshafen, Germany, HAMRADIO is the largest amateur radio event in Europe, attracting 15,000 people from 50 countries. The workshop was 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm on 27 June 2026 and filled the capacity 40 room.
The description of the workshop was “ESA, in collaboration with AMSAT-DL and the international amateur satellite community, intends to assess the feasibility of designing, developing, and operating an advanced satellite communications payload suitable for supporting in-orbit experimentation by the amateur satellite community in GEO-orbit. During this workshop we want to present 2 to 3 different consolidated amateur satellite mission concepts from the study. Further we want to collect feedback from the community for a final proposal.”
Peter Gülzow, president of AMSAT-DL, opened the workshop with a summary of QO-100 history and context. He shared that the operator (Es’Hail) expects another 9 years of life for the satellite. This means that we are a bit less than half-way through the lifetime of QO-100 transponder.
Peter introduced three potential categories of amateur radio satellite spacecraft.
- Enhanced QO-100+ Bent Pipe
- Digital Innovation Lab
- High Frequency Pathfinder
These appear to be very high-level “consolidated mission concepts” from the workshop description.
The next speaker was Frank Zeppenfeldt, PD0AP (M2M, IoT, Smallsats and Spectrum at European Space Agency). He explained that planning for what comes after QO-100 is the primary motivation of ESA’s futureGEO project. Frank said that a futureGEO payload would almost surely be built by industry, and that this workshop was intended to close out Phase 1 of the futureGEO project, and that a report would be written and published about Phase 1 in August 2026.
What is futureGEO?
The FutureGEO project is an ESA (European Space Agency) initiative to develop a future amateur radio payload for a geostationary satellite. The aim is to identify potential partners who would like to actively participate in the definition and development of a new amateur radio payload for a future geostationary satellite.
ESA proposed the idea of a geosynchronous satellite back in December of 2023. Frank secured €250,000 in funding to investigate the possibility of an amateur satellite or payload in geostationary orbit. The announcement was made in a presentation at the AMSAT-UK Colloquium.
ORI’s Presentation
Michelle Thompson was the third and final presenter at the workshop, speaking on behalf of ORI’s futureGEO proposal team. ORI is a signatory to the letter of interest (LOI) from AMSAT-DL, participated in the 2025 futureGEO Workshop at AMSAT-DL Symposium, and has submitted a one-page proposal as well as a white paper about ORI’s proposed design. Both of these documents can be found in the futureGEO GitLab as well as at the above links.
Michelle described the working hardware, firmware, and software implementations of Haifuraiya, or “High Flyer”. Haifuraiya is a functional prototype digital regenerative multiplexing amateur radio satellite system, with superior voice quality and integrated voice, text, and data. There are three implementations of the Opulent Voice ground station, and two implementations of the satellite segment. Processing occurs in the satellite. This is not a double-hop system. Uplink is frequency division multiple access Opulent Voice and downlink is DVB-S2 time-division multiplex. The design is carefully engineered and tested, completely open source, and fully documented. This poster summarizes the status of ORI’s proposal for futureGEO as of June 2026.
Slide from the talk presenting the design:
Download original PDF of the presentation poster below:
The poster was displayed at the AMSAT-DL booth for the three days of the show. There was consistent, strong, positive feedback for the design. Questions from the show participants were intelligent and meaningful, ranging from UX/UI theory and operations to the specific mathematics of the demodulator.
AMSAT-DL kindly and generously supported ORI with space and time to communicate a real-life working implementation of the futureGEO concept. ORI takes the futureGEO project seriously, and will complete both a terrestrial repeater version as well as a space-qualified communications board prototype of Haifuraiya.
ORI will participate in Phase 2 of futureGEO, and looks forward to the next steps of the project.