2015-10-18

2015 Digital Communication Conference Held In Arlington Heights, Illinois

I attended the 2015 DCC in Arlington Heights, Illinois, on Friday and Saturday, October 10th and 11th. It was held at the Double Tree by Hilton Chicago - Arlington Heights.  The staff was friendly and helpful.  Except for getting caught in two traffic jams due to accidents on the way back home on both days, the trip was flawless.

As for the technical information presented, it was a set of 45-minute speeches on projects completed or underway.  The conference was very informative about the current developments in digital communication. It took me two days for anyone to admit at this conference that digital communication was actually interpreting analog signals.

Highlights included a gentleman from Hungary (Zoltan Doczi, and András Retzler) that was working on a project using a basic Raspberry Pi to track RF signals in the European countries.  Although his speech had me loose focus for the first time during the conference because English was not his primary language, he was able to explain to me his project efficiently one-on-one.  Afterwards, I thought how impressed I was because I thought how I would be received in his country speaking his language about one of my projects...by far, he would win that contest.

Another theme this years at the DCC was emphasis on two main topics.  The first being software radios, presented by a gentleman from Berkeley.  The other was SDR, DSP, and other digital radio developments presented by a team of developers and salesman from a Texas based radio firm.

Our team of four students led by our Professor, Dan White, Ph.D., attended the conference to introduce SatNOGS to the attendees of DCC.  Professor White had felt the the attendees would be a good target base to get interested in the SatNOGS project and he was correct.  After each day on technical presentations, the demonstration room was open for interaction among the attendees.  The first day, we had a couple interested attendees. but after Professor White's presentation on Saturday, our booth was the most active at the DCC.  Unfortunately, I was not in the picture of the students used in his presentation so I was not approached to answer any questions, but the other three students were bombarded with questions at our booth.  One student even received an inquiry about a possible job offer or internship from Texas based radio firm (FlexRadio Systems).

In summary, I would like to thank all who arranged the DCC because it was very enjoyable.  The went far and beyond to accommodate me as a wheelchair user.  The facility was handicap accessible and they even supplied my personal attendant with a complementary ticket to attend.

Tom Biedron
KD9DFF
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2015-10-12

Digital Communications Conference - Arlington Heights, Illinois

This past weekend, the Digital Communications Conference (DCC) hosted by Tuscon Amateur Packet Radio (TAPR) was held in the Chicago Area. It was a very interesting experience. I was able to attend Friday and Saturday's events, and listen to the 16 presentations by various people around the US, Great Britain, and Hungary. As a student going in with no previous knowledge of what packet radio is or how it works, some of the information was a little deeper of a level than I understood, but I also did learn quite a bit from the presentations. The demonstration room was filled with interesting prototypes and kits from successful experiments of fellow hams. It was very interesting to talk with other hams about their ideas, and also to tell them about SatNOGS. Networking is always important; you never know where you might find internship or job opportunities ;)

Find out more info about TAPR at: www.tapr.org
Watch the presentations from DCC and other ham radio events here: http://arvideonews.com/hrn/

Ashley LeBlanc
K9MWF
73s

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2015-07-20

PSAT signals and ISS carrier with no modulation

Yesterday couple of students helped wire up our new Yaesu G-5500 rotator and verified everything moved as it should.  We have yet to fabricate a fiberglass cross boom for mounting our 2m and 70cm antennas and figure out where to put the mast and assembly.

We took advantage of a pass by PSAT / NO-84 which was launched recently on May 20.  It includes a unique mode with a PSK31 transponder with uplink on 10m and downlink on 70cm FM.  The AMSAT-BB mailing list is abuzz with people actively working the best transmission parameters and a system and software to make using this transponder easy.  We hand-pointed our assembled M2 436CP30 at the CubeSat and were able to get a few seconds of signal with what sounded like a single PSK31 signal at the time.


Today there are a few nice passes of the ISS which is scheduled to broadcast SSTV images again this weekend.  So far, all of the passes reported to AMSAT-BB and ours just now had no signal modulation.  Amateur radio operators worldwide have had good signal reception, but the images are not being modulated onto the carrier, so no pics for now.
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2015-05-25

Hamvention 2015 report

The trip to Hamvention 2015 in Dayton, OH was a fun time.  So many people and their organizations to get to speak with.  It seemed that many of the satellite-related groups haven't had much contact with each other.  As such, most of my time was spent talking with people from AMSAT, SatNOGS, and others to make acquaintances and find common ground and needs.  Lots of fun, but way more talking than I normally do!

In lieu of a better writeup, here are a bunch of pics from Twitter involving where I was.  If you click through to see the pics, you can find me on the side of a few frames, kind of like "where's Professor White"...















https://community.satnogs.org/t/satnogs-at-hamvention-2015/236
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2015-02-26

Slow-scan TV from the ISS

Last weekend and into this week the International Space Station was broadcasting SSTV signals on the ham station's 145.800 MHz FM downlink.  On Saturday the pass was high enough for my cheap UV-5R radio to pickup the signal and the timing was right to catch them during the broadcast and not in the 3min silence interval.

The result of an android phone running Robot36 sitting next to the radio:
The green lines were times when the signal went silent for a bit.  First time we've received and decoded space signals!
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Single-board computer up and running

Shortly after arriving in the mailbox, we have our pair of ODROID-C1's up and running!  This single-board-computer is similar to the Raspberry Pi 2 but better in most respects, yet still about $35.  The fact that the USB ports and GbE port are not shared on the same processor bus should come in handy for streaming raw I/Q samples from the SDR to somewhere else on the network.

Thanks to +Mike Good for giving both of the boards the shakedown.
Keyboard + mouse + HDMI
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