June 2008 - Eagle (INACTIVE) - mailman.amsat.org

Re: KC0OTR/AE
by rjansson＠cfl.rr.com 15 Jun '08

15 Jun '08

Bdale: What a great Fathers Day present that is, and what a masterful accomplishment for Elizabeth. Dick Jansson, KD1K ---- Bdale Garbee <bdale(a)gag.com> wrote: > Pardon this brief intrusion, but the list has been fairly quiet lately, > and I suspect a number of you who know her will be tickled to hear that > my 16-year-old daughter Elizabeth passed her Extra exam! > > :-) > > 73 - Bdale, KB0G > > _______________________________________________ > Via the Eagle mailing list courtesy of AMSAT-NA > Eagle(a)amsat.org > http://amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/eagle

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KC0OTR/AE
by Bdale Garbee 15 Jun '08

15 Jun '08

Pardon this brief intrusion, but the list has been fairly quiet lately, and I suspect a number of you who know her will be tickled to hear that my 16-year-old daughter Elizabeth passed her Extra exam! :-) 73 - Bdale, KB0G

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Re: ACP questions on Eham forum
by Michelle 05 Jun '08

05 Jun '08

Hi Dave! I am looking forward to OpenKM to provide archive (revision record and control) and document fetching. The plan from here is to use it as back-end support for the website, and not require participants to get a login/password for OpenKM. Blog, wiki, whatever - if it's useful it will get used and should be at least tried. I think they're great ideas. The blog for Namaste is our document feed source, but it gets very few comments because it's more of a utility than a place to post comments. If you want to see what it looks like it's here: http://namasteforamsat.blogspot.com/ We're more likely on Namaste to use wikipedia than something like eaglepedia. The construction of a useful wiki takes a lot of time and a critical mass of people willing to edit and contribute. It's worth trying since it can be a great resource. Whatever we can learn from eaglepedia, though, we need to apply going forward. I expect we will continue to use the Amsat News Service and the Journal to post articles, and whatever people gravitate towards (twitter has been really useful for us) to post status and smaller items. -Michelle W5NYV ----- Original Message ---- From: Matt Ettus <matt(a)ettus.com> To: Dave hartzell <hartzell(a)gmail.com> Cc: Michelle <w5nyv(a)yahoo.com>; eagle list <eagle(a)amsat.org> Sent: Thursday, June 5, 2008 11:08:32 AM Subject: Re: [eagle] Re: ACP questions on Eham forum Dave hartzell wrote: > On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 10:12 AM, Matt Ettus <matt(a)ettus.com> wrote: > > >> So developments have been proceeding informally and in [unfortunately] >> private email and phone conversations. There is no desire to keep >> anything secret, closed, or difficult to find. >> > > One of the disadvantages of going away from the wiki was the closure > of some activities to the public. > > It will be possible to open up OpenKM to the public, but do we really > want to expose the document management system to the public? Trac/SVN > architecture is inherently more "open" to the world. > I think the best solution would be to put all our larger documents in OpenKM. In the Wiki, we could have a link which fetches the latest version from OpenKM. That way we don't need everyone going into OpenKM to find docs. > Would team leaders (or team members) be interested in a public Blog, > to post items and status for public consumption? > That's an idea. We could also informally do this through the wiki. Matt

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Re: ACP questions on Eham forum
by Michelle 05 Jun '08

05 Jun '08

Here's my thoughts on documentation and the challenges you are facing. I strongly prefer simple and completely configurable work areas. This usually means doing something on a server I know I'm going to have access to for the foreseeable future. For example, I do recording projects for another organization. After three server moves due to people quitting, deciding they wanted to use the space for other projects, or getting evicted because someone accidentally didn't pay the bill and no one could decide what to do about it, I moved everything to my own server and that worked until we combined sites and things were run well enough to where I could move the project to the organization's servers. Now they complain about disk space, so it's not perfect, but the lesson learned was if you need something to be reliably available, you may have to do it yourself. Depending on another person's server is like depending on borrowing a car for getting to work. Sooner or later, it won't be available, for often very legitimate reasons, like getting to the hospital. Sometimes not, like the car is still parked at the bar they went out last night to. Anyway, you get the point. Simple in this case means that not all functions are going to be available. However, simple means it's easy to set up and maintain. OpenKM seems good for specific and/or closed teams. It's accounts-based, no? The good side of this is that it puts up a barrier to entry and prevents someone from checking out all your documents and doing whacky things with them for fun. The bad side of this is that it also provides a barrier to entry for interested persons or casual contributors, which are absolutely definitely desired and needed if the project is to be finished before the year 2025. Those casual drop-by, non-amsat people are high grade ore - especially the ones that are looking for just this exact hobby. It's not as useful as a public presence place for documents. Putting them there won't help the collaboration unless everyone has an account. The fact that the Eagle list was secret is one of the two reasons why namaste-dev was started. The other is that Eagle is about a satellite thingie, and I didn't want to piss off a bunch of people by hijacking the list for my own nefarious groundling purposes. I hate flying in airplanes. I don't like satellites. I don't like spaceships, have never wanted to be an astronaut, don't like the shuttle, and the ISS can suck it. I love ground stations. The goal with the website is to make all engineering documents available to anyone that wants to read them and then hopefully participate, and then archive all documents to amsat servers as soon as possible so that they're there, for the foreseeable future. The website continues to be the public front-end for the project, which allows anyone to interface with the developers, etc. and I'll maintain it as long as there is interest in the project. Setting up something like the ground station website for the payload project should be an easy thing to accomplish on the amsat server, if you don't have another one available. The amsat server already has stuff like subversion and trac on it. I'm happy to help solve the challenges in any way I can. Is there anything that you can think of that I can do to help? Making the Eagle list public should be easy enough, and would greatly help solve that issue. Your goal seems to be to publish the work that you are doing, and that's great news. -Michelle W5NYV ----- Original Message ---- From: Matt Ettus <matt(a)ettus.com> To: Michelle <w5nyv(a)yahoo.com> Cc: Andrew Glasbrenner <glasbrenner(a)mindspring.com>; eagle list <eagle(a)amsat.org> Sent: Thursday, June 5, 2008 10:12:38 AM Subject: Re: [eagle] Re: ACP questions on Eham forum > > I have the powerpoint presentations from Matt, and I have a paper for the physical link that is based on the content of the presentations, but I don't have any other engineering work for ACP to show people or that can help us with ground station design. We need to see the results of payload engineering work in order to continue to make progress on the ground station. > We have been running into a number of problems here -- - I have asked repeatedly for a Trac and subversion setup for a wiki and to post less formal documentation, actual code, sims, and other work. I still don't know the status of it, but I am assured it either has materialized or will soon, along with a password for me to use it. I presented an alternative outsourced service, and even offered to pay the bill, but that was vetoed. - OpenKM is great, but it doesn't let you post python or matlab code, and isn't really the right vehicle for that anyway. I have posted some documents there. - Most of my team members are not on the Eagle list, and can't get on there because it is invite only, and the inviter has been hard to get a hold of. - I have asked for an ACP mailing list as an alternative, but that hasn't happened either. So developments have been proceeding informally and in [unfortunately] private email and phone conversations. There is no desire to keep anything secret, closed, or difficult to find. Matt

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Re: ACP questions on Eham forum
by Michelle 05 Jun '08

05 Jun '08

Greetings Eagle! Siddhartha did indeed get what he was looking for, and some other radio astronomy stuff he was looking for as well. He posted to the namaste-dev list the other day. This brings us to Drew's question, to which I have an offer of a solution, or at least a partial solution. I'm happy to provide a web presence for documents concerning the ground station projects (Project Namaste) as well as the engineering documents for the payload that are relevant to the ground station, such as expected user interface, loading, congestion plans, call flow diagrams, quality of service, air interface, and anything relating to expectations of how the ground station is expected to behave from a satellite perspective. I have the powerpoint presentations from Matt, and I have a paper for the physical link that is based on the content of the presentations, but I don't have any other engineering work for ACP to show people or that can help us with ground station design. We need to see the results of payload engineering work in order to continue to make progress on the ground station. Since this mailing list is where I would expect to find people working on ACP, I'd like to invite anyone that is interested in working on any payload that wants ground station support (i.e. the 2m/70cm SuperPortable and the 5.8GHz/3.4GHz Portable/Fixed stations) to send any and all engineering documents, thoughts, requirements, goals, and lists to me or namaste-dev(a)amsat.org, and I'll be more than happy to present these work products on the website as well as include them in our document feed for delivery to readers and technical reviewers. Please see www.amsat.org/namaste to see the current presentation and organization. This is where your documents would be presented. This would provide an offsite storage. I don't currently provide any revision control other than hosting the current document. In other words, a document on the site is the current document. If any of you are interested in participating in the development of payload documents that affect ground station engineering, please let me know, and I will help you present them to the ground station team and the rest of the world to the best of my ability. I consider public relations and evangelization concerning the ground station to be primary responsibilities of leading the ground station team. Having a publicly accessible and open process goes a very long way towards spreading the word and increasing the chances of the project's success. Anything towards that end I'm ready to assist with. This leaves the question of what I mean by partial solution, above. Any engineering for the payload that doesn't have relevance for the ground station (like mechanical issues or other aspects that don't affect any part of ground station design) probably need to be made available elsewhere. -Michelle W5NYV Potestatem obscuri lateris nescis. ----- Original Message ---- From: Andrew Glasbrenner <glasbrenner(a)mindspring.com> To: eagle list <eagle(a)amsat.org> Sent: Wednesday, June 4, 2008 8:17:00 PM Subject: [eagle] ACP questions on Eham forum Word is getting out, but I really don't know where to point him other than the Symposium Proceedings? 73, Drew http://www.eham.net/forums/Satellites/1725 Hi, I attended a presentation by Matt Ettus, N2MJI, at the Palo Alto Amateur Radio Association's monthly meeting about the Advanced Communications Package. The project sounded very interesting and as I remember, Matt said that the ACP project's goal was to send up these amateur stations on commercial satellites in the geostationary orbit so that it eventually, someday, gives a trans-global reach for amateurs with portable/handheld radios. This was supposed to be an alternative to the Eagle project. I got talking to a friend and fellow operator who used to be very interested in amateur satellite work and he was very interested in knowing more about ACP. Is there a whitepaper, wiki or some kind of documentation briefly describing the project? I looked at the AMSAT site and could not find much. Any pointers will be appreciated. 73, - Siddhartha WV6U _______________________________________________ Via the Eagle mailing list courtesy of AMSAT-NA Eagle(a)amsat.org http://amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/eagle

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This fall
by Bob McGwier 05 Jun '08

05 Jun '08

I have informed the board and the officers of AMSAT that I am not a candidate for board of directors and cannot retain my VP position. I will continue to work as a technical volunteer and will serve gladly whomever the board chooses to replace me with should they wish my help. My workload has increased tremendously. When Rick asked me to be VPE, I was essentially retired and starting to doing SDR for fun. I was supported at work to do it because that is the nature of my employment. It has turned into a full time job and will require more and more of my time. This is good for SDR in my estimation, less so for AMSAT except insofar as it needs this SDR work. I thank all who have worked with me and I look forward to our continued collaboration. 73's Bob N4HY

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ACP questions on Eham forum
by Andrew Glasbrenner 05 Jun '08

05 Jun '08

Word is getting out, but I really don't know where to point him other than the Symposium Proceedings? 73, Drew http://www.eham.net/forums/Satellites/1725 Hi, I attended a presentation by Matt Ettus, N2MJI, at the Palo Alto Amateur Radio Association's monthly meeting about the Advanced Communications Package. The project sounded very interesting and as I remember, Matt said that the ACP project's goal was to send up these amateur stations on commercial satellites in the geostationary orbit so that it eventually, someday, gives a trans-global reach for amateurs with portable/handheld radios. This was supposed to be an alternative to the Eagle project. I got talking to a friend and fellow operator who used to be very interested in amateur satellite work and he was very interested in knowing more about ACP. Is there a whitepaper, wiki or some kind of documentation briefly describing the project? I looked at the AMSAT site and could not find much. Any pointers will be appreciated. 73, - Siddhartha WV6U

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AD6IW Dubus article
by Matt Ettus 04 Jun '08

04 Jun '08

I just wanted to send congratulations to ACP team member Goran Popovic, AD6IW, on his cover article in the latest Dubus Technik magazine. The article is about his beautifully designed 350 W solid state amplifier for 1296 MHz. Appropriately enough, Goran will be designing the 3.4 GHz downlink power amplifier for the ACP. It will mostly likely be a Class E amplifier based on silicon carbide transistors. Matt

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