Project Neptune

Neptune is an open source implementation of an open protocol for high-throughput multimedia drone communications from Open Research Institute. This protocol directly competes against the proprietary designs from DJI.

Implementation prototypes use the Xilinx Ultrascale+ and Analog Devices 9002 RFSOC. These development boards are accessible at no cost through ORI Remote Labs West. Amateur radio bands will be used to the fullest extent. Full Vivado and MATLAB licenses are included. 

A review of the OFDM-based physical layer draft specification will happen shortly and invitations are going out now. Participants must be proficient with the design review process, understand OFDM, accept our developer and participant code of conduct, and support open source work.

To join as a participant please visit https://openresearch.institute/getting-started 

Join the #neptune channel on ORI Slack.

To keep informed about our work you should know about our newsletter at https://www.openresearch.institute/newsletter-subscription/

Thank you to everyone that has made this innovative and groundbreaking project possible. We deeply appreciate your support and we will be successful with this design.

Class Announcement: HDL Coder for Software Defined Radio

Open Research Institute (https://openresearch.institute) has negotiated a customized class for advanced digital radio work. Content was chosen to directly benefit open source workers in the amateur radio service.

Registration link is below. A heavily subsidized link is offered. Class runs 1-5 May 2023 and is entirely virtual. Theoretical and practical content is offered. Class is taught by Mathworks instructors and uses their training platform. 

https://us.commitchange.com/ca/san-diego/open-research-institute/campaigns/hdl-coder-for-software-defined-radio

The goal of this class is to expand the technical volunteer corps in amateur radio and amateur satellite services. Radio work accomplished on FPGAs and complex RFICs is the primary focus.

Inner Circle Newsletter February 2023

Greetings all! Welcome to the February 2023 issue of the Inner Circle Newsletter from Open Research Institute.

Join the Inner Circle

Sign up for this newsletter at http://eepurl.com/h_hYzL

Thank you so much for your time, attention, and support. We appreciate you, we welcome your feedback, and we are dedicated to serving the community to the best of our abilities. You can get in touch with the ORI board of directors directly at hello@operesearch.institute.

A Puzzle Just For Fun

Here’s a puzzle. Chicken Nuggets have been on the menu at the international fast food chain McDonald’s since 1983.

If Chicken McNuggets are sold in packs of 6, 9, or 20, then what is the largest number of nuggets that cannot be ordered?

Answer is at the end of this newsletter!

Projects

Our volunteer teams have been busy and successful, and our project lineup has grown.

Regulatory Efforts: ORI works hard to promote and defend open source digital radio work. We do all we can to help move technology from proprietary and controlled to open and free. Our work on ITAR, EAR, Debris Mitigation, and AI/ML are where we have spent most of our time over the past two years. We were a member of the Technological Advisory Committee for the US Federal Communications Commission in 2022, and co-chaired the Safe Uses of AI/ML Subworking Group. We have received consistently positive reviews for all of our work, and there has been increasing use of the results.

Ribbit: this open source communications protocol uses the highest performance error correction and modern techniques available to turn any analog radio into an efficient and useful digital text terminal. No wires, no extra equipment. The only thing you’ll need to use it is the free open source Android or IoS app on your phone. Learn how to use this communications system and get involved in building a truly innovative open source tactical radio service by visiting https://ribbitradio.org

Join Ribbit mailing lists at: https://www.openresearch.institute/mailing-lists/

Amateur Satellite: ORI has the world’s first and only open source HEO/GEO communications satellite program, called Haifuraiya. We will demonstrate all working parts of the transponder project at DEFCON 31, where broadband digital communications and open source electric propulsion will be featured. Find out how to support or join this and other teams at https://openresearch.institute/getting-started

AmbaSat for 70 cm: We’ve redesigned the AmbaSat board to move it from 915 MHz to 70 cm and it will be flown on a sounding rocket this year. With increasing interest in LoRa for both space and terrestrial use, this has proven to be a popular and useful project. The design has been adapted for applications in India and Japan.

Opulent Voice: a digital protocol that seamlessly combines high fidelity voice and data, using modern forward error correction, authentication and authorization, and efficient minimum frequency shift keying modulation. Opulent Voice will be flown on a sounding rocket this year and it is the native digital uplink protocol for Haifuraiya. Completely open with the high quality voice we deserve to hear. Due to the bandwidth requirements of the 16kHz OPUS codec, Opulent Voice can be used on 70cm and above ham bands, or anywhere else where the modest bandwidth requirements can be met.

Remote Labs: We have two remotely accessible workbenches for FPGA development, with Xilinx 7000 and Xilinx Ultrascale+ development boards as the focus. We also have several SDRs and radio utility devices available through virtual machine access. The 7000 series development board has an Analog Devices ADRV9371 radio system attached, and that has enabled a number of open source FPGA products to be published. This is a unique resource that has produced a lot of good work and is constantly being improved and updated. In addition to the development boards, the laboratory has a network accessible spectrum analyzer, an oscilloscope with logic analyzer extension, power supplies, frequency and power counters, and dedicated human resources available to help students, volunteers, or professionals contribute to open source work. Help it be more useful by spreading the word about ORI Remote Labs.

Equipment available: https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/tree/master/Remote_Labs/Test_Equipment
How to get an account: https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/blob/master/Remote_Labs/ORI-New-User-Setup.md
Using FPGA Development Stations: https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/blob/master/Remote_Labs/Working-With-FPGAs.md

Versatune: amateur digital television next generation hardware and software product. It is open source and affordable. We have committed engineering resources to support Versatune and are very excited about how things are going. Some of the Versatune team will be at Hamvention 2023 in Xenia, OH, USA, and it will be represented at DEFCON in August 2023.

HF antennas: We have a novel foldable antenna design for space and terrestrial use. The hardware prototype will be demonstrated at DEFCON. This design manipulates radiation resistance to produce best-of-class results. Think you can’t do 160m without an enormous antenna? Think again.

HF QRP: Coming soon, an exciting HF QRP digital radio board and protocol. The hardware prototypes will be demonstrated at DEFCON. What might happen when we combine the HF digital radio with the novel foldable antenna? We think you’ll be delighted.

Battery Matching Curves: are you available to mentor a college student interested in learning how to match up charge and discharge curves from NiCd cells in order to create battery packs? These packs would then be tested and/or deployed in the field. Our student volunteer has collected the data and is looking to learn how to use Jupyter Notebooks to select the cells to create battery packs.

Logistics

We’re growing and adapting!

We will be changing our GitHub project name from Phase4Ground to Open Research Institute very soon. Phase4Space GitHub project will change to Haifuraiya, which is the program name for our HEO/GEO design. These changes better reflect the content and purpose of the 64 repositories that span everything from important historical archives to open source music to the most modern open source encoders available.

We have a very well-qualified applicant for our open board of directors position. We would like to invite interested community members to consider applying to ORI in order to expand the board beyond this filled position in order to take us from our current five members to seven. Given our continuing growth, a larger leadership team would ensure continued smooth operations. These positions are unpaid, engaging, and can be demanding. The most important skill set is a strong sense of ethics and service.

Fundraising and Grants

We’ve applied for the GitHub Accelerator Program (Remote Labs) and the IEEE Innovation Fund (Polar Codes in Ribbit). If you have a recommendation for ORI in terms of partnerships or collaboration, please let us know at hello@openresearch.institute

Support ORI financially directly through the website https://openresearch.institute. There is a PayPal donation widget at the bottom of almost every page. Donations can be directed to any project, or to general operations. ORI has a very low overhead, with most projects coming in under 5%.

Support our open source propulsion work and get a cool desk toy at https://us.commitchange.com/ca/san-diego/open-research-institute/campaigns/where-will-we-go-next

We’ve raised enough money to cover materials for machining the engine parts. The next step is to raise enough money to pay for the electronics. Please help spread the word!

Thanks to our wonderful community, we have employee matching in place at Microsoft and Qualcomm. If you have an employee matching program at your work, and you think ORI would fit in, please consider nominating us. Our EIN is EIN: 82-3945232

Events

Where can you meet up with ORI people?

QSO Today Ham Expo

We support and attend QSO Today Ham Expo, held online 25-26 March 2023. The theme of this event is “New License, Now What?” and focuses on people new to amateur radio.

Our page for QSO Today Ham Expo content is https://www.openresearch.institute/qso-today-ham-expo-technical-demonstrations/

IMS2023

Join us at the amateur radio social at the International Microwave Symposium (IMS2023) on Tuesday 13 June 2023 in San Diego, CA, USA at 6pm. It will be held in a beautiful outdoor venue with food and drink provided. The easiest way to register for this event is to purchase an exhibition badge and then sign up for the social. https://ims-ieee.org/ is the event website.

DEFCON

We are getting ready for our biggest event of the year. We have proposed an in-person Open Source Showcase to RF Village for DEFCON 31 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA from 10 – 13 August 2023.

Our page for the event, with all the latest and greatest details, can be found at https://www.openresearch.institute/defcon/

Want to help at DEFCON? Please visit https://openresearch.institute/getting-started and let us know!

IWRC 2023

IEEE wants to bring together all participants to take full advantage of CHIPS Act funding. IEEE will have an Innovative Workforce Resources Conference in Little Rock, AR 13-14 September. There will be a reception at the Clinton Presidential Library, and attendees will enjoy the best BBQ in the country. The National Science Foundation requires that a certain percentage of funding has to be spent in states that don’t get their fair share of research money. The goal of this conference is to pull together small researchers from small business like ORI and do research, with Arkansas as a focus.

We couldn’t agree more. After all, we are putting a lot of time and energy into Remote Labs South, located just outside Little Rock, AR. Bringing innovative open source digital radio work to students, workers, and volunteers that need it the most simply makes sense. If you can attend IWRC 2023 and help represent ORI please get in touch. We will be reaching out to IEEE chapters in Arkansas as well.

Read about the CHIPS and Science Act here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act

Puzzle Solution

43 is the largest number of nuggets that cannot be ordered.

What is the largest number of McNuggets that you can’t buy with packs of 6, 9 and 20? After putting in their blood, sweat, and tears, the mathematicians found that the answer is 43. You cannot buy 43 nuggets with packs of 6, 9 and 20, but you can buy any amount larger than 43.

Please see Mike Beneshan’s excellent blog about this type of problem at https://mikebeneschan.medium.com/the-chicken-mcnugget-theorem-explained-2daca6fbbe1e

The other Non-McNugget numbers are 1,2,3,4,5,7,8,10,11,13,14,16,17,19,22,23,25,28,31,34, and 37.

Trivia: You can get 47 in two ways: 36+19+120 or 06+39+120.

We’ve used the McDonald’s version of the chicken nugget to present and frame this mathematical puzzle. Here’s a link about the history of this menu item: https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/history-of-chicken-mcnuggets

Robert C. Baker invented the chicken nugget, among many other things. He was a true innovator of what can be fairly called “modern foods”. A brief wikipedia article about him can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_C._Baker

A song written about this remarkable inventor can be enjoyed at this link: https://youtu.be/OEa8wqv4QM0

Do you have an idea for an interdisciplinary puzzle for our next newsletter? We’d love to hear about it. Write ori@openresearch.institute

Until Next Time

Thank you so much for being part of our Inner Circle! You are the motivation for all of this work, provided to the general public for free. We believe it makes the world a better place.

Deviation Limits of the MD-380

Not enough deviation for Opulent Voice

We measured the deviation limits on the MD-380 with firmware from OpenRTX. Thank you to Redman for help with modifying the firmware to make this test as easy as possible.

The transmitted signal is about 10 dB down at 3000 Hz and almost gone at 4200 Hz. Therefore, there is not enough deviation for Opulent Voice.

The part of the radio under test was the HR_C5000. This is a part from Hong Rui and is a DMR digital communications chip. The chip handles 4FSK modulation and demodulation, among other functions.

According to a translated datasheet for the HR C5000, adjustment of the frequency offset range not possible. It appears to be designed only for +/- 3 kHz. Unless there’s an undocumented feature, or gain is added after the HR C5000, then +/- 3 kHz is the maximum deviation for this radio.

The HR C5000 puts out two analog signals MOD1 and MOD2, which are combined and then drive a varactor diode. The varactor might well have more range. Or it could be replaced with one that has more range.

Below is a photo essay of the testing and screenshots of results.

30 AWG wire soldered to pin 5 of the HR_C5000 on the MD-380. This is one of two audio inputs to the modulator. It’s the one used for signaling tones, and not the one used for microphone audio, in the original design. Ground wire attached as well and brought out. Firmware modifications disabled M17 baseband output when PTT pressed. Pre-emphasis and filters disabled by putting radio in M17 mode. The red wire is part of the standard M17 mod for the MD-380.
Ground wire attached to point on board and brought out. Modifications inspected by KB5MU in Remote Lab.
The black rubbery weather seal gasket around the perimeter of the cast heatsink means there’s no way for wires, even very skinny ones, to come out through the seam in the case.
Hole was drilled in the side of the case and the wires brought out. Radio was put back together. Battery, display, etc. all working after modifications. Notice the 20 dB attenuator on the output of the HT. Its lowest output power is 1W nominal, which matches the maximum rated input of the spectrum analyzer, so the attenuator was added to protect the spectrum analyzer’s front end.
Test setup.

Test Results

Transmitted signal before modified firmware.
Transmitted signal after modified firmware. Notice no modulation because the baseband signal has been disabled.
1kHz sine wave at 100 mV injected to pin 5 of the HR C5000.
1kHz sine wave at 220 mV injected to pin 5 of the HR C5000.
3 kHz sine wave at 220 mV injected to pin 5 of the HR C5000. Signal is about 10dB down at 3 kHz
4200 Hz sine wave at 220 mV injected to pin 5 of the HR C5000. Signal is approximately 45 dB down.
Looking at the low end, this is one half a Hz at 220 mV injected to pin 5 of the HR C5000.
Two tenths of a Hz at 220 mV injected to pin 5 of the HR C5000. Notice the discontinuities. These were not seen when the signal generator was connected to an oscilloscope. It could be that when the modulating frequency is too low, it interacts with a PLL or other frequency stabilization loop in the radio.
It would not be an issue in the original design, with all audio coupled through capacitors. No way anything that close to DC would get to the audio chip.

DEFCON 30 Activity Report

Open Research Institute’s amateur radio open source showcase at the annual hacker convention DEFCON was located in RF Village (RF Hackers Sanctuary) in The Flamingo Hotel. A volunteer crew of seven people from three US states staffed the exhibit that ran from Friday 12 August to Sunday 14 August 2022.

RF Village hosts a very popular wireless Capture the Flag (CTF) event. It is a top tier contest at DEFCON and the winners are recognized at closing ceremonies. RF Village also has a peer-reviewed speaking track. See previous talks in the YouTube playlists here: https://www.youtube.com/c/RFHackersSanctuary

RF Village generously offers space for exhibits from the community. For 2022, the exhibits included Open Research Institute, Kent Britain PCB Antennas, Alexander Zakharov (ALFTEL Systems Ltd.), and Starlink (SpaceX). Starlink brought two stations and allowed visitors to experiment with network and physical security.

Total attendance at DEFCON 30 was estimated at 27,000. Conference events were held in the new Caesar’s Forum + Flamingo, Harrah’s, and Linq convention centers.

Open Research Institute’s exhibit had multiple parts. The entry to the exhibit was a poster session. Posters presented were ITAR/EAR Regulatory Relief for Amateur Satellite Service, Libre Space Foundation’s Manifesto, Authentication and Authorization Protocol for Amateur Satellites, and the Ribbit Project Introduction and Architecture. Ribbit allows an amateur operator to type in SMS messages on an Android app. Each SMS message is converted to digital audio tones. The tones are played out the phone’s speaker into the microphone of an amateur radio handheld or mobile rig. This can turn any analog HT into part of a digital messaging network. The app can do point-to-point communications and also has a repeater mode. More open source implementations are planned. 

All posters were enthusiastically well-received. Specific technical feedback was received on the Authorization protocol that will improve the design. There will be a presentation about the Authorization and Authentication protocol at the September 2022 QSO Today Ham Expo.

Visitors understood the purpose and potential of Ribbit and could download the free open source Android app from a QR code on the poster. The code was also on the Ribbit stickers handed out at the booth. All 300 of the Ribbit stickers were handed out by Sunday morning. 

Find the Ribbit “Rattlegram” application here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aicodix.rattlegram

There will be a Ribbit presentation at the September 2022 QSO Today Ham Expo.

The ITAR/EAR Open Source amateur satellite regulatory relief poster garnered a lot of attention. A very large fraction of DEFCON attendees are familiar with ITAR/EAR, which are a set of regulations that govern the way we design communications satellites in the USA. People that read the poster at DEFCON understood and appreciated the value of the work, which provides long-awaited regulatory relief for the amateur satellite service. The poster presentation led to an invitation to Policy Village Sunday afternoon for a panel session hosted by the Office of the National Cyber Director. Summary of that session can be found in ORI’s 19 August 2022 project report. The ITAR/EAR poster will be part of the Projects Exhibits at the September 2022 QSO Today Ham Expo.

Foot traffic flowed past the posters and into the live demonstrations.

The first live demonstration visitors encountered was from OpenRTX (https://openrtx.org). This demonstration used a tablet computer running OpenWebRX to display modified MD-380 transmissions. Visitors could use headphones to hear live transmitted signals. Posters at the table explained the modifications required to implement the M17 protocol on the MD-380 and described the motivation and value of the work, with an emphasis on the use of the free and open CODEC2 voice codec. The use of CODEC2 in M17 replaces the proprietary AMBE codec found in every other digital voice protocol for VHF/UHF ham radio. There was strong interest in both the M17 and the DMR work from OpenRTX, broad understanding of why proprietary codecs are not ideal, and consistently positive feedback. 500 OpenRTX business cards were printed with QR codes for the OpenRTX website and nearly all of them were handed out.

The second demonstration was Opulent Voice. This is a high bitrate open source voice and data protocol. It’s designed as the uplink protocol for ORI’s amateur satellite program. The Authentication and Authorization fields are built in and sending data does not require a separate packet mode. The baseline voice codec for Opulent Voice is OPUS at 16 kbps. Higher bitrates are a build-time option. For the DEFCON demonstration, Opulent Voice was transmitted from an Analog Devices PLUTO SDR and received on an RTL-SDR/Raspberry Pi. Visitors could use headphones to listen to the received audio. The modulator and demodulator code can be found at https://github.com/phase4ground/opv-cxx-demod. 300 custom art stickers for Opulent Voice were ordered and all were handed out.

The two demonstrations compared and contrasted voice quality (3.2 kbps vs 16+ kbps), regulatory limitations (VHF/UHF vs. microwave), and approach to framing (P25 style vs. COBS/UDP/RTP).

The next station had stickers, buttons, patches, ORI’s Tiny CTF, Haifuraiya proposal printouts, and a Trans-Ionospheric badge display.

ORI’s “Tiny CTF” was a hidden web server, accessible from the wifi access point located at the OpenRTX demonstration. The access point allowed people to view the OpenWebRX display directly on their connected devices. Participants that found the hidden web server and then blinked the LEDs on a certain piece of equipment at the booth received a prize.

Haifuraiya (High Flyer) is an open source highly elliptical orbit communications satellite proposal. Microwave amateur band digital communications at 5, 10, and 24 GHz are proposed. Transmissions are frequency division multiple access Opulent Voice up, and DVB-S2/X time division multiplexed down. A presentation about this proposal will be at the September 2022 QSO Today Ham Expo.

Based on the feedback about the amateur radio themed Trans-Ionospheric badge, ORI will update and build another round of these badges. Round one of the Trans-Ionospheric badge was a very successful open source project fundraiser. The badges have been enduringly popular in the community, and they can serve as radio peripherals that display radio link and payload health over bluetooth. The artistic design of the badge is based on the front panel of the Zenith Trans-Oceanic radio. Find out more about the Trans-Ionospheric badge here: https://www.openresearch.institute/badge/

There were very high levels of interest, enthusiasm, and positive feedback throughout the weekend. Friends from Ham Radio Village and Aerospace Village visited the exhibit and shared their experiences. The organizational support from RF Village leads was excellent. ORI will return to DEFCON in 2023 with another round of open source digital radio demonstrations. 

Amateur radio experimenters and their projects are welcome at Open Research Institute. Individuals can join for free at https://www.openresearch.institute/getting-started/. Projects can apply at https://www.openresearch.institute/your-project-is-welcome/

HamCation 2022 Report

HamCation 2022 Report

Paul Williamson (Remote Labs), Douglas Quagliana (P4DX), Michelle Thompson (ORI), Ed Wilson (M17), and Steve Miller (M17) represented the breadth of projects from Open Research Institute at HamCation 2022.

ORI’s “Tonight’s The Night: SDRs are HOT” booth made its first appearance in nearly two years. Available at the booth were stickers, pins, patches, shirts, consulting, and project updates. ORI’s “extra chair” seating area was appreciated by volunteers and visitors alike. Booth visitors heard about the successful DVB-S2X modem work from ORI and progress on the end-to-end demo of the entire satellite transponder chain. At Open Research Institute, it doesn’t work until it works over the air. Due to the efforts of a truly wonderful international open source team, the custom FPGA code is coming together very well, and Remote Labs continues to evolve. The Phase 4 Digital Multiplexing Transceiver project is on budget, on track, and highly likely to succeed. The return on investment is high. The team isn’t anywhere near done innovating, publishing, and enabling high-tech space aand terrestrial amateur radio work. If you want to be a part of this, or just follow along, visit https://openresearch.institute, go to “Getting Started”, and sign up for the Phase 4 Ground mailing list. This is “home base” for announcements from ORI.

Right beside ORI’s booth was the “future of amateur radio”, the M17 Project. Ed and Steve from M17 brought working hardware, firmware updates, and also demonstrated several different software implementations throughout the weekend. M17 held their weekly net on Friday live from the booth, gave away stickers, magnets, and pins, and captured the hearts of all who visited. You can get involved with this project at https://m17project.org

AmbaSat re-spin was a frequent topic of conversation. The five AmbaSat boards from ORI, which operate at 70cm, have been distributed to the firmware team, and they have begun development and are seeing success in university and hobbyist labs. The goal is to create a compelling application, put the hardware on a sounding rocket, apply for a launch license, and send this project to space in a way that makes the amateur community proud. While “AmbaSat Inspired Sensors” is ORI’s smallest received grant, it has by far the highest capability return on investment of any ORI project.

ORI and M17 booths were located in the North Hall. While the other buildings are larger and many consider them to be higher profile, booths in the North building are what you must walk by to get to the Information Booth and Prize Booth. Since the vast majority of participants visit this part of the show, it is, in our humble opinion, the best possible location.

Michelle Thompson (W5NYV) presented about Digital Communications Technology at the ARRL Expo Technology Track held on Thursday at a conference center near Seaworld. There were four tracks of presentations at the Expo: Contesting, Handbook, Technology, and Emergency Communications.

Michelle reported a positive, enthusiastic, and engaged audience for her ARRL Technology Track talk, and has high hopes that ARRL will continue doing events like this moving forward. She discussed ORI’s Polar Code initiative, successful regulatory and legal work, why open source LDPC work is so important to amateur radio, the four fundamental components to digital communications, and why the M17 protocol was selected as ORI’s satellite uplink protocol for the P4DX transponder project. Michelle invited M17 principals to speak about their work, and opened the floor for questions and comments from the many highly competent and curious technical hams that were in attendance. Subjects covered ranged from asynchronous computing to concatenated coding. The rumors about toilet paper being a fundamentally important part of this presentation are entirely true.

ORI organized a Friday forum track for Clearspan Tent #1 that ran from 11:15am until closing. HamCation was extremely generous in giving us time to present work from a wide variety of people. Here’s our lineup for 2022.

11:15 am
Understanding and Changing Amateur Radio Regulation / Open Source Digital HTs are Real! by Bruce Perens (K6BP)

12:30 pm TAPR – TangerineSDR Update, or How to build an SDR without any parts by

Scotty Cowling (WA2DFI)

1:45 pm M17 Project by Ed Wilson, Steve Miller (N2XDD, KC1AWV)

3:00 pm GNU Radio work at ORI / FreeDV HF Voice Update 2022 by Douglas Quagliana, Mel Whitten (KA2UPW, K0PFX)

3:00 pm Society of Amateur Radio Astronomy SARA by Tom Crowley (KT4XN)

At both the Expo and HamCation, ARRL set the pace this year for satellite talks and satellite demonstrations, with a video (please see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhyUbC_o1JM&ab_channel=ARRLHQ) providing practical examples of amateur satellite operations. Patrick Stoddard (WD9EWK) gave a tutorial on satellite operations at the ARRL Expo in the Handbook Track. Amateur satellite was very well supported from ARRL this year, and we have heard this will continue to strengthen going forward.

With some optimism, ORI looks forward to returning to in-person events. The next planned in-person event is DEFCON (https://defcon.org/). Last year, DEFCON was held in person. Proof of vaccination was required. Masks were required. It was a highly successful and enjoyable event. This year, for 2022, ORI will be represented in DEFCON villages and activities. We are looking at applying for M17 to be part of Demo Labs, multiple radio links between villages to demonstrate a wide variety of technology, and presentations about the R&D that we do.

If you would like to be a part of this, and we do need you, then please join the Slack channel for DEFCON planning. Quite a bit of work is underway already. The goal for DEFCON 2022 is over the air demonstrations, outreach, fun, swag, and supporting our friends at all the villages we’ve been involved with over the years.

DEFCON is run very differently from traditional amateur radio conventions. The most significant practical difference is that DEFCON has a written code of conduct, and those written community standards and policies are enforced. It has a very diverse and very interdisciplinary attendance. Unlike many technical or hobby conferences, participation in the DEFCON community is possible year-round through participation in local groups that meet monthly.

DEFCON is a very large event, with attendance of over 30,000.

DEFCON is devoted to a very broad spectrum of experimental, commercial, and open source work. Participation by the government, industrial, information security, hacker, hobbyist, and scientific communities has steadily grown over the past 30 years.

The next virtual event for Open Research Institute is Ham Expo, 12-13 March 2022. Andre Suoto will have an excellent talk about our open source LDPC encoder for FPGAs and ASICs. This is in the main track. We will have a wide variety of work and projects represented at our booth, which is in the vendor hall. Open Research Institute is a non-profit sponsor of Ham Expo. We’ll have friendly and accessible “office hours” during the event.

2021 Retrospective

Greeting all, and welcome to the close of 2021 at ORI.

For a high-level summary of what Open Research Institute is and what we have been up to, please watch the very short video presented at Open Source Cubesat Workshop 2021. The recording of the talk is here: https://youtu.be/VG9-Mc1Hn4A

If you would like to keep up with what we do, then subscribing to our mailing list and YouTube channel helps in several ways. More people find out about what we do because our work will get recommended more often to new people, and you get notifications of new content when it’s published.

Please visit https://www.youtube.com/c/OpenResearchInstituteInc/featured and subscribe to YouTube.

Please visit https://www.openresearch.institute/getting-started/ for information on joining the mailing list and Slack.

Join Phase 4 Ground Trello board:
https://trello.com/invite/b/REasyYiZ/8de4c059e252c7c435a1dafa25f655a8/phase-4-ground

Join Phase 4 Space Trello board:
https://trello.com/invite/b/GRBWasqW/1336a1fa5b88b380c27ccf95d21fec79/phase-4-space

We have other social media accounts as well (Twitter, Instagram, FaceBook) and we gratefully accept help and support there too. Want to be part of the social media team? Write ori at openresearch dot institute to apply.

https://twitter.com/OpenResearchIns
https://www.facebook.com/openresearchinstitute
https://www.instagram.com/open_research_institute/

Here are our challenges and successes from the past year and what we’re looking forward to in 2022. There’s a lot going on here and some of the things we are facing are not fun. Some of the discussion is political and tedious. We have some decisions that have been made and some big ones to make for 2022 and beyond. Your opinions matter. Comment and critique welcome and encouraged.

First and foremost, we thank the individuals and organizations that have made our work possible. Funding comes from YASME Foundation, ARRL Foundation, ARDC Foundation, Free Software Foundation, our Trans-Ionospheric and JoCo Badge projects, proceeds from the Gold Medal Ideas ORI store, and people like you.

2021 Retrospective

We are a research institution. We are not a ham radio club. Our primary focus is to carry out open source work for the amateur radio space and terrestrial bands. We expect this work to be used by amateur radio groups that execute and operate designs in space and on earth. This expectation has not been met in some of the ways we anticipated, but we have a broad path forward, a lot of things going very well, and we are going to take full advantage of all the positive developments over the past year in every way we can.

This next part is not the most fun story to write or read, but there’s a lot of very good lessons learned here, and it needs to be put in one place so that our amateur satellite volunteers know about it and can find it.

One can skip ahead (by clicking here) to “Successes in 2021” further down the page to get straight to technical progress.

When we say we expected our work to be used by amateur satellite groups, we assumed this meant AMSAT. Primarily AMSAT-NA, but we are also here to serve AMSAT-DL, AMSAT-UK, and so on. ORI is an AMSAT Member Society, and has showed preparation, enthusiasm, and experience through continued contributions to the amateur satellite community. ORI volunteers have professional, academic, and amateur experience with collectively at least a couple dozen payloads in orbit, ranging from GEO commercial to LEO amateur. A very large fraction of our volunteers are new to amateur radio. They have never volunteered for AMSAT or any other legacy satellite group before. Other volunteers have experience with AMSAT but no current role because of the politics of AMSAT-NA GOLF. I can say without any reservation that there is no loss of capability to any AMSAT organization from ORI activity. We have always encouraged volunteering for and membership within whatever AMSAT organization is nearest to you. It’s not just supportive words, but actions as well. We have sold AMSAT-NA memberships at numerous events over the years. We have actively promoted TAPR, AMSAT, ARRL, and other amateur groups at every opportunity. We’ve happily worked with TAPR and ARRL to great positive effect.

We have achieved some truly significant wins in the regulatory sphere with ITAR/EAR and Debris Mitigation, have groundbreaking success in P4DX comms development, and have one of the very few functional advanced communications research remote access lab benches in existence. We have expanded the AmbaSat Inspired Sensors project to move the AmbaSat to 70cm in anticipation of sounding rocket and space tests, have fully supported M17 Development and Deployment, and have proposed an employment program to ARDC to directly confront the problem with open source burnout in DSP/FPGA open source amateur designs.

We really do not suck.

However, despite all this good work, AMSAT-NA leadership, including senior officers, have consistently and publicly described ORI as “grifters” and “thieves” and “frauds”. Officers of AMSAT-NA have said we are “undeserving of any community support” and have taken actions to try and make this opinion a reality. It hasn’t worked, but these aggressively provocative and negative public posts from AMSAT-NA officers and members about ORI are clearly intended to harm. The attacks date back to 2018. ORI has not responded to any of this. However, ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, and participants in ORI need to know what’s being said and done.

ORI has had work censored from AMSAT publications and events. An ITAR/EAR update article submitted in October 2021 was removed before publication. According to the editor, this was the first time ever an article had been censored in the AMSAT Journal. The article had been requested by the editor and is in the draft of that issue of the Journal. It was personally squashed by the AMSAT President after the draft Journal was sent out. Several presentations and some papers were ordered to be eliminated at the last minute from 2020 AMSAT Symposium. The work had been welcomed by the submissions chair. This exclusion was unprecedented as well.

This sort of bizarre censorship has no place in amateur radio. Our disappointment with these decisions has been communicated to the editor of AMSAT Journal and the submissions chair for AMSAT Symposium.

For 2021, ORI co-hosted a half-day conference in collaboration with IEEE. This Information Theory Space and Satellite Symposium was successful, got great reviews, and IEEE has asked several times if ORI would be willing to organize something like this again. This gave us a chance to present some of the sort of work that we think should be part of AMSAT Symposium.

You can find the event recordings here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSfJ4B57S8DnhlrRya50IxGP90_uGpiho

Why do we care about any of this grumpy opposition? Why be concerned about censorship from a relatively small event or newsletter?

Because AMSAT-NA is presumed to be the primary advocacy group for amateur satellite activity in the United States. Because we want all AMSAT organizations to be successful. Because AMSAT and ARISS-USA have claimed that they are gatekeepers for amateur radio access to NASA. Because AMSAT-NA currently controls access to things like IARU committees for Region 2. Because AMSAT-NA gets irate when anyone else meets with the FCC on behalf of the amateur satellite service, but will not present anything outside of internal AMSAT-NA interests.

We care about this because ORI showed up and contributed within the AMSAT framework in good faith.

AMSAT-NA is, to be blunt, supposed to help us do exactly what we are doing. We are not a “threat”. We are not “thieves”. We are not “grifters”. We are not “frauds”. We don’t “siphon technical members away”. We are not “an embarrassment”. We deserve absolutely none of this sort of thing. We have invited AMSAT-NA to participate in every single major endeavor that we have carried out and accomplished. This inclusive and cooperative spirit has not been reciprocated.

Tacit acceptance of this sort of behavior is the real embarrassment.

For 2022, we will (of course) continue to utilize the amateur radio bands. All radio work will directly benefit amateur radio terrestrial and space. There will be no loss of opportunities or restrictions of goals for technical work. However, our associations and attention moving forward will focus on communities and organizations that share basic values with ORI. There will be some changes as we adapt, evolve, and grow. We can’t afford to spend time trying to work with organizations completely out of step with open source amateur satellite work, no matter how famous, wealthy, or historical they happen to be.

Successes in 2021

There is a lot of good news here.

Both the San Diego Microwave Group and the San Bernardino Microwave Society have been actively supportive and provided material assistance, volunteer time, and expert advice that we simply would not have received anywhere else. We would not have had a successful meeting with the FCC about Debris Mitigation without the support from members of these two radio clubs. Members generously offered their time, input, and guidance. All the regulatory work can be found here: https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/tree/master/Regulatory

Based on this meeting, we had a series of Orbit Workshops in November 2021. Recordings posted to the debris mitigation channel on our Slack.

The ITAR CJ Request work was funded through a grant from ARDC. The EAR Classification, successful Advisory Opinion Letter from Commerce, FAQ, and “How to use this work” flow graph were paid for with a loan to ORI. The process to fundraise to pay back this loan is underway. The final amount for EAR/Advisory Opinion/FAQ/Flowgraph is $14,425.00 Similar to the ITAR CJ Request work, this amount is substantially less than initial estimates. Credit goes to excellent counsel at Thomsen and Burke LLP and a motivated volunteer team at ORI that handled as many of the preparations as possible. Active sustained involvement reduced costs and increased competence and awareness of the many legal issues we were dealing with.

For 2022, we have two legal efforts that we are considering becoming involved with. Fundraising for those efforts will happen in advance of the work. This is a change from how we did the ITAR/EAR legal work, where fundraising was done after the legal work was completed.

We would not have had a successful multi-media beacon demonstration without support and advice from Kerry Banke and Ron Economos. A video presentation of this work can be found at https://youtu.be/vjfRI1w_dSs?t=609 and documentation can be found here: https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/tree/master/Engineering/Transmitters/DVB-S2-Multimedia-Beacon

This work is presented as a terrestrial beacon, but is also the default digital download for the P4DX transponder payload.

The payload work is currently focused on producing an FGPA-based end-to-end over-the-air demonstration. There are multiple repositories. The best way to get an overview of this work is either through the README.md files in the repos at https://github.com/phase4ground and https://github.com/phase4space.

If reviewing source code and block diagrams is not your thing, then watch the introduction of this video: https://youtu.be/fCmzS6jBhHg followed by the most recent Technical Advisory Committee meeting here: https://youtu.be/V2BlIp7XYMM

Thomas Parry is the Primary Investigator and lead the TAC meeting. Wally Ritchie (SK) was the previous and founding Primary Investigator, and he presented the overview in the design review linked above.

P4DX is our digital multiplexing microwave amateur band transverter. The native digital uplink is M17 FDMA and the downlink is TDM DVB-S2/X. A high-level architectural paper can be found here: https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/tree/master/Engineering/Requirements/Architecture

One of the current roadblocks with the end-to-end demo is a necessary expansion of capability in Remote Labs West. In order to use the Analog Devices ADRV9371 RFIC development board, we can get by with using an SD card image in the FPGA development station. However, this requires a lot of manual intervention, so booting the filesystem over NFS is an obvious improvement. This turned out to be impossible because the kernel from Analog Devices does not appear to support NFS. So, we’re fixing it and will (assuming success) submit whatever capabilities we add to the kernel back to Analog Devices. In the meantime, integration of the various bodies of FGPA code continues. Immediately following the NFS boot addition is DVB-S2/X verification station bring-up, in anticipation of being able to test what comes out of the ADRV9371. That’s just one example of the type of work that has had to happen all year in order to get things done.

Remote Labs have become much more than a “wear item” along the way. Once it became clear that the internet-accessible lab benches had potential to support a much wider variety of projects than just P4DX, volunteers started putting time into making sure they were as easy to use as possible. You can find out more about what Remote Labs are and how they work by going here: https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/tree/master/Remote_Labs

Remote Labs East (Florida) equipment has been moved to Remote Labs South (Arkansas). The move was necessary due to the untimely death of Wally Ritchie in July 2021. The new site will need additional funding to complete that Florida did not require. A grant application was made to ARDC in late August 2021 for this work. Remote Labs South will also have additional capabilities for bacteriophage and interferometry work. Both are open source efforts.

There is a backup bridge funding plan to get the lab bench at Remote Lab South operational. We can temporarily divert funds allocated to P4DX for FPGA software licenses, as the floating license approach has worked out well for us. The original budget planned for 10 node-locked licenses as those were the type of licenses we have received as an organization in the past. With only 1 floating license required for work so far, this leaves some margin in the budget. This is enough margin to develop Remote Labs South infrastructure while waiting for a response about funding from ARDC, without further delaying deployment of this lab.

Remote Labs are a good example of the frugality, public science orientation, and opportunistic spirit of ORI volunteers. We look forward to many years of making the equipment available to the open source community. We could use your help in spreading the word about this asset.

HamCation and Ham Expo have been invaluable. The staff and volunteers have been friendly, supportive, and creative. We are looking forward to HamCation 2022. If all goes well this will be our first in-person event most of us have been able to attend in quite a while. We have a booth in our usual spot. M17 Project and TAPR are on either side, and the large Society for Amateur Radio Astronomy booth is on the other side of TAPR. DATV is in the same row. ARRL will have a large presence. We have a lot of forum time and plenty to talk about. Returning to in-person events is a big step and there is extra stress, risk, and planning involved. If you are willing to be part of HamCation, please get in touch and we will add you to the planning spreadsheet and discussions.

IEEE Computer Society, Information Theory Society, and Signals and Systems have been incredibly supportive. As mentioned above, in 2021, ORI co-hosted a half-day conference in collaboration with IEEE. This Information Theory Space and Satellite Symposium was successful, got great reviews, and IEEE has asked several times if ORI would be willing to organize something like this again.

You can find the event recordings here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSfJ4B57S8DnhlrRya50IxGP90_uGpiho

We have received a lot of positive feedback from IEEE section, region, and national executive teams. The biggest challenge with IEEE is that they are not the best or easiest way to publish open source or open access work. They are honestly not set up for public access papers. IEEE is split between academia and industry members, and that’s the constituencies more or less served. Despite the big differences between a tiny open source non-profit and a gigantic professional development organization, there is a substantial amount of interaction and genuine mutual support. IEEE does not exist without volunteers. Therefore, what we are doing is recognizable as a thing of value by everyone in any role any of us comes into contact with. We also benefited from having access to the salary survey results, anonymized membership statistics, and a targeted member survey in order to help construct the Engineers General grant proposals to ARDC. Is there a possibility of funding through IEEE? Yes, although there are a lot of limitations.

We have solid relationships with a number of Universities. Working with academic institutions is not simple as a non-profit, but we have transcended these difficulties several times and are part of the process of getting space “done better” for students wherever we can. Our most recent involvement is getting AmbaSat at 70cm, the DVB-S2/X microwave band work, and M17 equipment on board sounding rockets and in the running on several LEO platforms. Is there a possibility of funding through Universities? Honestly, no. They expect funding from us, in order to do anything with us. That is just the way the current engineering academy operates. Students are not “free labor” now and never really have been in the past.

We have brought a small grant to a University, with the professor as the Primary Investigator (AmbaSat Inspired Sensors). We would be willing to do that again, if we were fortunate enough to get a professor of the same motivation, experience, and availability, and fortunate enough to get enough grant money to ensure student time. In general, the overhead customarily demanded at a University, and the costs of getting significant seat time from enough students, require much larger grants than we have pursued to date. If you know of an opportunity or have an idea, get in touch with ORI board and let’s see what we can achieve.

AmbaSat Inspired Sensors has redesigned the AmbaSat board to move from 915 MHz ISM LoRaWan to 70cm amateur radio satellite band. Thank you to Vidya Gopalakrishna and Jay Francis for making this happen. LoRa with integration to both SatNOGS and The Things Network through bridging is prototyping now. The first hardware with the 70cm part has been received and works. There were other changes to improve power and ground and routing. All of the details can be found in the kicad-conversion branch at https://github.com/phase4space/AmbaSat-1/tree/kicad_conversion/Release

This past year has been a significant step forward for the M17 Project. The protocol has been strengthened, the number of development boards in the community has increased, the amount of hardware that M17 can work on has increased, and the lab on the East Coast of the US is moving forward. There have been numerous successful public outreach efforts resulting in a steady increase in name recognition, awareness of the communications mode, and participation on the M17 Discord. A large amount of lab equipment has been earmarked by ORI for M17. This purchase opportunity came from Open Lunar Foundation and will put M17 lab into a highly capable category from the start. All of us associated with M17 would like to recognize the OpenRTX project. This team is a vital part of the M17 ecosystem and has done a significant amount of highly technical work to enable M17 on the MD-380 HT. OpenRTX has contributed a lot of engineering work, verification, validation, and lab tests for M17.

https://m17project.org/

https://openrtx.org/#/

Open Lunar Foundation and ORI collaborated on an SBIR grant application for funding targeting LunaNet in January 2021. While our application for funding was not successful, the feedback from the reviewers was positive and very constructive. The process for applying was clear, the technical work in preparing the application lined up with all of ORI’s goals for P4DX, and the teamwork with OLF was excellent.

https://www.openlunar.org/

We attempted to apply for a STTR with Tek Terrain LLC for opportunistic positioning and ranging using LEO signals in mid-October 2021, but we were not able to complete the application in time. We look forward to the next opportunity to work with a for-profit on something like this, as there are dozens of opportunities through a variety of government agencies for research and development. This particular project would have put some significant work into the public domain during Phase 1 of the grant.

We have an opening on our board of directors. Our co-founder Ben Hilburn has stepped down from the board. Thank you very much to Ben for helping found and build ORI. We welcome you to a (much less demanding) senior advisor role.

If you have a recommendation for someone to invite, or you would like to volunteer for this role, then get in touch to start the process. There are a few IRS limitations on who can be on the board to prevent conflicts of interest. No relatives of current board members, for example.

Current board is listed at: https://www.openresearch.institute/board-of-directors/

Our open source workers/employment initiative is called Engineers General. Two grant proposals were made to ARDC after a series of productive meetings with their staff. The initiative got a lot of positive feedback. All of ARDC’s feedback was incorporated into a set of revised grant requests that were re-submitted in October 2021.

We have 6 additional resumes that have been submitted to us. We have received a very large amount of interest in this initiative. Information from IEEE salary surveys, informational interviews with open source workers, and combing through peer reviewed papers resulted in the hypothesis of Engineers General, and all of this information was communicated to ARDC in support of the grant requests.

ORI board has the capacity, capability, and experience to manage contracted workers, and there is a population of highly qualified people that want to work in open source.

We do not have a timeline on when we will hear back from ARDC. P4DX took 11 months to approve. The ITAR legal work funding wasn’t pressing since the funding application followed completion of the work. The AmbaSat Inspired Sensors grant application was folded into P4DX at some point during its review process.

Rent-a-GEO was submitted in October 2019, and there has not been a final answer from ARDC about that proposal as of today. Rent-a-GEO is now down to ~2.5 years left on the offer of 5 years discounted rental of the transponder. This is closer to 2 because the team assembled for Rent-a-GEO would have to be rebuilt.

For those unfamiliar with this project proposal, it would enable a variety of GEO development work over useful space channels with a footprint that covers the continental United States. We did obtain a private pledge of funding for the rental due to the urgency with the lifetime of the resource coming to an end, and we have communicated this pledge of funding to the vendor handling the transponder rental. However, there are substantial contingencies with this funding source, and the vendor has a lot of challenges that they are dealing with. Negotiations are slow. I’ll keep working on this until EchoStar9 is turned off. In the meantime, we have had a series of successful experiments in Europe.

We are headquartered in California, USA. According to Cal Non-Profits, a 501(c)(3) dedicated to helping California 501(c)(3)s, they really do not know of any other organizations like ORI (or Open Lunar Foundation). We are quite rare. The vast majority of non-profits in CA (and across the US) are devoted to health and human services. Non-profits heavily dominate “last mile” services delivery in the US, and there’s a wealth of information about them and advice on how to operate. We have taken advantage of as much as we can all the advice given by Cal Non-Profits, and will continue to rely upon them for guidelines and checklists and statistics about the non-profit sector.

Almost all of the science and technology non-profits are private foundations. Almost all of the research institutes in this category have a single very large source of money, have paid staff, and are clearly dedicated to a mutually beneficial relationship with commercial consumers. This is a very different way of operating from ORI, which is registered as a public charity.

And, the way we have been funded directly impacts this status as a public charity. 501(c)(3)s like ORI are required to have diverse funding. We have to comply with what’s called a “public support test” that kicks in after our fifth year of operation. We’ve been around three years and have two more to go before this test is applied. While we did come very close to passing this test in 2020, we will not pass it for 2021. The specific test is that 33.3% of our funding must come from what are called public sources. Technically this means at least 33.3% of donations must be given by donors who give less than 2% of the nonprofit’s overall receipts. That 2% test means that each non-profit’s donation numbers will be different, depending on the overall receipts.

With ARDC being our primary funding source, all of the other sources amounted to at most 30% in 2020. In 2021, the vast majority of funding came from ARDC, putting the percentage from other sources down much further. A quick calculation today shows other sources of funding coming in at most 24%. Given the 2% rule, that number is in reality lower.

If we had just one unusually large grant from ARDC in our financial history, then that would be ok. The IRS lets you ignore one unusually large grant. You can punch that one out of your public support test calculations.

One can argue that all of the money from ARDC should count as unusually large, and all recipients out there doing tower trailers and buying equipment for mesh networks and university club shacks shouldn’t have to worry about this at all.

The amateur community has never sourced or sunk large amounts of money like this. Hams have a reputation for being tight-fisted with money. Frugality is a virtue that we ourselves value and employ, as described earlier in this letter in the way we’ve extracted several “extra” features from the P4DX grant money that a less motivated organization would not bother to do.

A step function of money of the magnitude that ARDC has, showing up in the amateur radio community, cannot easily be matched or diluted. ARDC principals have heard this from community members with philanthropic experience from the get go.

For almost any amateur radio organization, outside of the very largest, diverse sources of money on the order of an ARDC grant simply do not exist. This means that ham non-profits can take one large grant from ARDC without much trouble or effect on their status, but that’s it. The vast majority of ham clubs and organizations file nothing more than a postcard with the IRS every year. Above $50,000 in gross receipts and then they have to file the full 990. A large influx of money on an ecosystem of organizations that have never had access to it before includes both negative and positive effects.

For organizations like ORI that fully intended to work with ARDC for the long haul, this puts a huge additional fundraising burden on the leadership. Since ORI has ruled out selling memberships, the fundraising alternatives are even more challenging in an environment where a highly successful ham club auction raises $400.

So what happens when your public charity fails the public support test? Well, actually, nothing too horrible, but only if you are prepared for it. You are, after a process that does have a subjective component, converted from a public charity to a private foundation. The downside is that you have to re-file all your taxes as a private foundation going back all five years. There are some upsides. Private foundations do not have to follow some of the rules that public charities are required to comply with.

As soon as we figured out we were well on our way to being converted into a private foundation, which was mid-May 2021, we told ARDC. This was “news to them”. After talking it over with ARDC staff, we then hired a non-profit law specialist for advice (at ORI expense), wrote everything down, and came up with a plan. ARDC could either fund ARDC service programs that ORI would execute, and it would not “count against us”, or ORI could simply plan on becoming a Private Operating Foundation associated with ARDC. These options were proposed to ARDC staff. There was email back and forth and several zoom calls. The answer was eventually “no” on ARDC running Service Programs, but “yes” on ORI becoming a Private Operating Foundation associated with ARDC.

Problem solved! We had a party to celebrate. The feelings of IRS doom are kind of a big deal for a relatively new non-profit. We viewed this as being “hired”, in a way, by ARDC.

This solution held until October 2021. It was no longer clear that ARDC wanted this type of relationship. Both the “run Service Programs that ORI executes” approach and the “Private Operating Foundation associated with ARDC” approaches require a lot of communication and work. ARDC was not set up for either of these solutions. ARDC operates very differently from ORI. It does not have the same management structure or style, and it does not communicate like we do. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t “impedance match” to make up for these differences. It’s unreasonable to expect them to change.

So, in November of 2021, the board of ORI and other senior advisers with non-profit and foundation experience recommended reversing the “conversion plan”. This means raising enough money to bring the ratio back up above the public support test limit to stay a 501(c)(3). The fundraising goal, as of today, is $150,000. This money has to come from diverse and much smaller sources. This must be raised over the next two years. It will be substantially more administrative and executive work to remain independent, but it’s how we were founded and how we have operated all along. The path forward is clear enough. The series of decisions during this process took a large amount of time and energy from May until November, but it was well worth the effort. Decisions about what type of non-profit organization ORI is or becomes have enormous impact on what we do and how well we are able to do it.

$150,000 (or more) is a large amount of money to raise in small amounts, especially within the amateur radio community. Have some advice? Want to get involved raising the money? Have another solution? Welcome aboard.

The fact that we exist and are successful in amateur radio communications R&D is very unusual. This means that we are vulnerable and it means we have more work to do, every year, to remain operational. Your support is vital for success.

Thank you to everyone that is pulling for us to succeed! We are looking forward to 2022 and welcome your ideas, time, talent, treasure, and advice.

-Michelle W5NYV
CEO ORI

ORI participation at OSCW 2021

Recording, transcript, and slides of Open Research Institute’s presentation at Open Source Cubesat Workshop 2021.


Hello everybody! I’m Michelle Thompson W5NYV and I’m here to tell you all about what Open Research Institute is and what we have been doing.

Open Research Institute (ORI) is a non-profit research and development organization which provides all of its work to the general public under the principles of Open Source and Open Access to Research. As we all know, these mean particular things, and those things have to be defined and they have to be defended.

Open Source is type of intellectual property management where everything you need to recreate or modify a design is freely available. As a baseline, we use GPL v3.0 for software and the CERN Open Hardware License version 2.0 for hardware. All we do is open source work, primarily for amateur radio space and terrestrial, but also some other fields, as you will see.

So who are we?

Here is our current board, and our immediate past CEO Bruce Perens. We have one opening on the board, as Ben Hilburn, one of our founders, very recently retired from being an active Director at ORI. He remains as one of our senior advisors. We are looking for someone to join ORI board that supports what we do and wants to help make it happen. It’s an active role in a flat management structure. Board members are are experienced in management, engineering, operations, and technology, and three out of the current number of four are from underrepresented groups in STEM.

As a board, it is our mission to serve our participants, developers, and community members. We now have at least 535 that participate in what we call the Open Source Triad: our mailing list, Slack, and GitHub. All work is organized in independent projects or initiatives.

We have some affiliations and we proudly ascribe to the Open Space Manifesto from Libre Space Foundation. We work with radio organizations, several universities, and have worked with a variety of for-profits.

What do we do?

Here’s a visual summary of top level projects and initiatives. The vertical axis is risk. Higher risk projects are at the top, lower risk projects are at the bottom. Maturity increases left to right. Maturity may indicate schedule, but the score is also influenced by complexity or difficulty. The color of the shape indicates how much stress that project is under or what the risk level is at this time. The size of the shape is the budget estimate. By far, the largest budget, riskiest, and least mature work is in the AquaPhage project, which is open source bacteriophage research and development. Bacteriophage are viruses that attack and destroy bacteria. This is biomedical and not amateur radio. This project was halted by COVID and has not yet resumed.

Our digital multiplexing payload project is called P4DX, and it’s in the middle in green. This is a multiple access microwave digital regenerating repeater for space and terrestrial deployment.

Channels divided in frequency are the uplink. The uplink is on 5 GHz. The processor on the payload digitizes and multiplexes these signals and uses DVB-S2/X as a single time-division downlink. The downlink is on 10 GHz. The system adapts to channel conditions and handles things like quality of service decisions. For example, low and high latency digital content. The uplink is divided up using a polyphase channelizer, based on the open source work done by Theseus Cores.

For the current prototype, we are only using MPEG transport stream, but generic data is the goal. The prototype beacon signal is 5 MHz wide and we are using one modulation and one error coding (yet). We are not yet rotating through all the allowed combinations in DVB-S2 (yet).

Our prototype work can also serve as a terrestrial multimedia beacon. Work was demonstrated to groups with mountaintop spaces in October 2021, and deployment will be as soon as possible.

M17 project is an open source VHF/UHF radio protocol. Think open source digital mode HTs and repeaters. This project is only slightly more stressed than P4DX, but it’s further along in maturity because it’s narrower in scope. We believe M17 Project will be very successful from current development to scaling up to commercial product launch. The M17 protocol is the native digital uplink protocol, with some modifications for 5GHz, for P4DX. We are working hard to get M17 on and through more satellites and more sounding rocket tests today.

Engineers General is our initiative to hire highly competent open source workers to reduce burnout and increase quality in open source work important to amateur radio. We have one contractor currently, eight resumes, and have applied for funding for two more. We are actively looking for funding for the remaining five.

The “birdbath” is a large dish antenna at the Huntsville Space and Rocket Center. This was used in the past, but has been parked for decades. It took two years of negotiation, but ORI has the support of the museum and permission to begin work renovating this dish for citizen science and amateur radio educational use. Work parties from earlier this year were rescheduled due to COVID.

Upper right there are two completed projects. One is ITAR/EAR Regulatory Work. It took over a year, but we received a determination from the State Department that open source satellite work is free of ITAR, from Commerce that it is free of EAR, and we obtained an advisory opinion that publishing on the internet counts as publishing under the regulations. This is a huge step forward for not just amateur radio, but anyone that wants to contribute to open source space work.

Debris Mitigation Regulatory Work took 10 months to complete. The process culminated in a highly successful meeting with the FCC Wireless Telecommunications Board, the Office of Engineering Technology, and the Satellite Bureau in late October 2021.

Lower right is Battery Matching, a project that matches NiCd cells for very durable batteries in the style that used to be done in amateur satellites, and puts the methods and documentation in the public domain.

AmbaSat Inspired Sensors used to be on the bottom right but now it’s bumped back a bit in maturity level is higher risk. This was supposed to be a project done by students at Vanderbilt university, but no students materialized, primarily due to COVID. We had one kick-butt professional volunteer who was working on a 10GHz beacon that went into the sensor connector on the main board, but the project was moving slowly, and ORI decided to provide additional operational support. Additional volunteers joined the team, we reviewed the finances, and then took some actions. We updated the main board to move it from the illegal ISM band it was in to the legal 70cm ham band. We improved power and ground and addressed some other design concerns. The boards are back as of last week and software and firmware development is underway. The 10 GHz sensor “beacon” work is proceeding quickly as well. AmbaSat is an excellent educational platform, but the ISM band decision isn’t the only problem with it. It’s very small.

We decided to look at combining the 70cm AmbaSat with another open source satellite board to make a combined spacecraft design. I reached out to Pierros Pappadeus at Libre Space, and we are moving forward with using the SatNOGS Comms project. We look forward to contributing to the FPGA codebase and flying both AmbaSat and SatNOGS Comms designs as early and as often as possible, starting with sounding rockets and ending up in space.

All of these projects are open source and all work is published as it is created.

When?

We have timelines! We were incorporated in February of 2018, got our 501c3 in March of 2019, and we hit the ground running and haven’t stopped since.

We’ll distribute a copy of the slides so you can see our wins and losses along the along the way. There’s a lot going on in here.

Here’s what’s been going on since March, and the future plans we know about.

We use Agile framework for management, and most of us have some sort of formal certification either completed, or in process. This is the Agile manifesto and it is the foundation of how our board decides things and how it supports project leads and volunteers. Note the second item, and put in the word hardware instead of software, and that’s one of the reasons we demonstrate early and often and incorporate the feedback quickly.

Where are we?

Here’s the locations of the concentrations of current major contributors and participants. When we say international, we mean it. Our participants have a wide range of ages, are generally educated in engineering, come from a variety of backgrounds, but do tend to be relatively young and male.

We have some physical locations that are important for carrying out the work we do. Remote Labs are lab benches connected to the internet that allow direct access to advanced lab equipment and two different large Xilinx development boards and DVB-S2/X gear. We have relocated our second Remote Lab equipment from Florida to Arkansas, and have added a three-dish interferometry site for amateur radio and public science use. Remote Labs are here for you all to use. If you need large FPGA resources and test equipment up to 6 GHz, then we have your back.

We bought Open Lunar Foundation’s satellite lab. It’s in storage waiting for the M17 project lab construction to conclude, and then the equipment will go there to pack that lab full of wonderful test equipment, materials, and supplies.

Why do this?

We believe that an open source approach to things like amateur digital communications, bacteriophage research, and sticking up for the non-commercial use of space will result in the best possible outcomes for the good of humanity.

We have a lightweight agile approach to doing things. We keep our overhead very low, we are radically participant-focused, and the work must be internationally accessible.

You can see that public demonstrations and regulatory work are given a high priority. Working code and working hardware are highly valued. Working means working over the air.

Thank you to everyone at Libre Space for the support and opportunity to present here today.

https://www.openresearch.institute/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/OSCW-2021-W5NYV-ORI-1.pdf

26 March 2021 Engineering Report

Here is a visual walkthrough of the features on the TEBF0808 UltraITX+ Baseboard for Trenz Electronic TE080X UltraSOM+, presented by Paul KB5MU and Michelle W5NYV.

These stations are available to the community from Open Research Institute’s Remote Labs. We currently have two sets of gear and are procuring two more.

The Trenz platform allows for full access to the FPGA, power reduction work, and thermal modeling. All are extremely important for space applications.

We also have the Xilinx development board for the Ultrascale, for preliminary work.

The FPGA module goes in the lower left empty square with the high-density connectors.

The FPGA module has a heat sink, called a heatspreader, that is a machined metal plate. It attaches to the FPGA module with screws. However, it needs an intermediate layer to conduct the heat from the FPGA to the metal plate. The plate is designed to fit many different modules, and there’s a gap between the metal plate and the top of the components on the FPGA module.

This gap is usually filled with a specific gap-filling thermal paste.

Which happens to be out of stock, all over the world.

So, of the four stations we’re settting up, one will be fitted with a thermal adhesive film. This comes in sheets and can be cut to size. It can be used for space, so as we dial down the power consumption with code adjustments, we can measure the thermal results with something that is appropriate for the space mission.

The other three will get gap-filling goo directly from Trenz. This is the only way to preserve the warranty on these expensive modules, so it’s not a bad choice. And, this gives us something to compare the sheet against. We’ll test both in thermal modeling and chamber.

-Michelle W5NYV

Remote Labs Equipment Review

Transcript of Introductory Remarks

Greetings all,

Welcome to the Open Research Institute Remote Labs Equipment Review.

Open Research Institute (ORI) is a non-profit research and development organization which provides all of its work to the general public under the principles of Open Source and Open Access to Research.

Remote Labs are two physical lab benches. They have equipment for advanced digital communications design work. This equipment will be accessible online to anyone, anywhere that wants to work on open source amateur radio satellite service or open source amateur radio terrestrial engineering development.

The primary focus of the equipment list reviewed today is to support the design, verification, and test of the DVB family of links. DVB-S2, S2X, and T2 are all commonly found in amateur radio. DVB-S2X is the protocol family used by Phase 4 Ground and Space.

Remote Labs is a part of an extremely important process of re-establishing free and open international collaboration with groups such as AMSAT-DL, JAMSAT, and AMSAT-UK, and to increase and amplify collaboration with Libre Space and other open source groups. This is possible for ORI to do by using the open source carve-outs in the US export control regulatory framework. These controls have impeded international cooperation on amateur satellite work for a long time.

A significant amount of regulatory relief was achieved over the summer by ORI for amateur radio satellite work, and more work is going on right now to build upon this success. Please see the Open Research Website news section for more details on that. Today’s discussion is not about satellite technology, but about the equipment and resources required.

We are fortunate to have the advice and input of people that make a living by using remote labs at work. The advice received so far has been heard and acted upon. Python, HTML5 plus Javascript, and command line access will be the initial methods upon to provide secure access to the equipment.

We will not be writing or using a heavy or complex software framework for the Remote Lab. We will be authorizing and authenticating users. It is highly likely that we will use the same authentication and authorization approach that we intend to use for payload communications access, in order to get more experience with that design. In other words, you may be authenticated and authorized for Remote Labs the same way that you will be authenticated and authorized for the payload communications system.

We will definitely be documenting how to use the lab. We will be responsive to feedback about accessibility and ease of use.

There will be someone physically present at the Remote Labs. The equipment is not installed in racks at an unattended site. If a function needs on-site setup, or a test plan can only be done with someone physically at the bench, then that’s how the work will be done.

Remote Labs is offered as a community resource. Therefore, the review process must include community feedback. Thank you for your time here today to discuss and review the equipment list.

As an example, Thomas Parry has provided the following feedback.

1) The initial list had no power supply listed.

2) A computer controlled coax switch matrix would be very useful to control where the signals are going between test gear, DUT, etc. without physical intervention

3) Some form of general purpose digital/low frequency IO device like an analog discovery would be pretty useful for controlling things remotely

4) A way to get arbitrary RF in and out of the PC, ie. an SDR, would be very useful

5) And please remember cabling.

Wally Ritchie responded with an updated list that includes coax relays controlled from a USB relay board(s), and the other items.

Our practice will be validate and measure any cables we make in-house, buy, or obtain as surplus or donations.

I can answer your questions about budget, operation, and policy at the close of the review, or via email.

Please welcome Wally Ritchie who will lead todays Remote Labs Equipment Review.