2016 Hamvention

This past weekend the Valpo SatNOGS team took Hamvention by storm.  Hamvention in Dayton, OH is the largest gathering of Ham radio operators in the world.  Our team with Corey Shields showed off the SatNOGS ground station.  We had the opportunity to  meet a variety of new people and were able to spread interest to a lot of people all at once.  The convention started Friday with Corey giving a talk at the TAPR forum.  This seemed to spark intrigue with project because the booth became very busy after the forum let out.  Friday night we went to the TAPR/AMSAT banquet.  The most interesting part of the banquet for me was the variety of people we met.  The table we sat at had engineers, machinist and teachers.  There is very few places that you can see so many professions. This was evident Saturday when we got to meet someone from hackaday.   Hamvention was a great success for our group because it gave us great connections and hopefully inspired new people to start building ground stations and also gave the student motivation to go get our ham radio licenses.

2016 GSAW Takeaways

Our research team had the opportunity to attend the 2016 GSAW conference in L.A. We were able to hear various presentations on the current trends in the ground systems area of aerospace. It was a great introduction for us and provided a wealth of knowledge about the current status of ground system architectures. We also attended a working group session on open source software. In this session we worked with industry members to discuss the current status of open source software usage in the industry and how this has affected the way the industry operates. This was interesting because it pertains to our current work with the SatNOGS project, and we were able to learn ways to help improve community outreach within the project. We were also introduced to the free open-source COSMOS TT&C (Telemetry Tracking & Control) software provided by Ball Aerospace, which may be beneficial for our team to use with our Odroid controller software.

2016 Ground Station Architecture Workshop- L.A. California

For two weeks this group of individuals worked hard on our poster. Now we get to be in Los Angeles listening to cool cutting edge technology in the ground station field.  We have heard from many speakers about different challenges in the industry of ground stations.  One of my favorite talks was the keynote presentation today given by Steven Kremer.  He talked about how people can be the most important assets for even the most complex system which can be directly correlated to our project.  After that we then broke out into working groups.  We all went to a open source workshop.  We then broke out into focus groups about different  subjects in the open source realm.  For me personally, I got to learn more about the open source licensing in the workshop sessions.   Understanding this has allowed me to understand more about what our project is about, and how other people's projects, like the open source software cosmos, can be used to further our cause.  I also learned about how instead of using one open source projects I can use multiple to help better the overall effectiveness of the design.  This workshop session has allowed me to do some great networking and allowed me to learn about how to better improve the SatNOG's project.

John White

Ground System Architectures Workshop 2016

Our research team was given an amazing opportunity to attend the 2016 Ground System Architectures Workshop from February 29 - March 3 in Los Angeles, California. The workshop consisted of many sessions with multiple speakers each. It was a great overview, introduction, and development of the ground station community for our research team. We were the only undergraduate students in attendance, and most attendees were excited to see us there. There were many discussions about how recent graduates do not have all the skills that these big aerospace employers are looking for. I used the opportunity to remind them how much influence they have over what we learn in our curriculum. If these employers can communicate to their interns what they want to see, the interns can in turn report this to their professors. The theme of GSAW 2016 was focused on embracing rapid development in the aerospace field. One of my favorite presentations was centered around the idea of how much the industry needs to scale down for the inevitable change. I am very excited to see what is in store as we enter this third space age, and I am even more excited that I was given an opportunity to become part of it.

Grace Freigang

Ground System Architectures Workshop - Los Angeles

Our trip to Los Angeles for the three day GSAW workshop has been a great opportunity to network with people in the aerospace industry. We have had the opportunity to learn more about the requirements in aerospace and gather more information about what the current challenges in the field are and how aerospace is changing.

The most interesting part of the week for me were the workshops that we attended at the end of the second day. We signed up for different three hour sessions, and did what is called an unconference. Basically how this works is people propose questions that they have or that they would like answered, with a few running at different time slots, and then everyone attends the ones they are interested in. This seemed to be a very effective way to spread ideas and let people know what challenges you have run into or provide insight as to what you have done right or wrong. I would definitely like to try this type of idea sharing session sometime in a university setting just to see what types of things it could work for.

This weekend was great for networking and getting the word out about SatNOGS and that mission, as well as learning about a potential industry that we could apply the knowledge we are obtaining through our research to.

Ashley LeBlanc

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

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