We have only one way forward for Eagle or the Intelsat opportunities and that is raise money. The days where we had our engineering cowboy and cowgirl friends doing engineering experiments for rocket manufacturers or space programs and were willing to sign us up to ride on experimental launches for "free" are gone, long gone. We signed on to those launches without equipment in hand, built, etc. Those days are over. So we have a serious chicken and egg problem. We need to be credible to raise the money. What was being attempted and ended in personal disaster, and I hope will be again soon with new management (meaning my replacement and NOTHING MORE), is a design and build out of equipment that "will prove the point".
CONTROVERSY FOLLOWS:
There is an alternative to think about. I would not wait forever for the larger picture to come together, for the good of AMSAT and amateur radio. A likelihood assessment needs to be made regularly about the "Vision Thing" and the will power to change directions should be found if it needs to be done. We could put together a small, simple package and smaller than desirable antennas and give our users analog transponders on an Intelsat platform. This would require large antennas on the ground and would serve to make our current user base quite happy I am sure. If we do this, it should be the absolute dumbest, most bullet proof, impossible to destroy, dumber than rock, transponder without a single chance of failing in 300 years unless the rocket blows up or it is hit by a meteor. It would be a box with two connectors and a power plug going to the smallest possible CREDIBLE antennas. There has been an argument that this is very undesirable for the long term health of AMSAT, Inc. I made the argument in the open and have suffered regular personal threats as a result since from one very angry disgruntled member. I am sure it was the manner in which I presented the argument that caused the reaction so I am 99% to blame.
But this is clearly outside of the vision statement of AMSAT, but it would be a way forward. If we come in with very low mass, with little footprint and 50-100 w peak power requirements, and we look at the matrix of costs Intelsat gave us, I think we might be able to raise that amount from "amateur radio sources".
PARTY LINE:
For the bigger payload and more complex vision, ACP driven, we will need 10-20 times that much money. I will be the first to admit that I have been utterly daunted until about 12 months ago, trying to decide what to do, how it might be accomplished. Intelsat came first, and then a way we could to try and get the attention and then respect of FEMA/DHS soon followed. All of the personal work I did to find a way forward had absolutely nothing to do with engineering. It was playing bureaucratic games and finding "low friends in high places" work. Very unsatisfying personally but I could not see any other way forward.
Anyway, both are ways to go. Our new leaders will decide. Either choice will be maddening to others should AMSAT choose it. The new AMSAT board in October and the officers they choose will have a hill or two to climb to say the least. I think they need to be given the best possible opportunity to make choices and that entails doing some technical work, taking the work done by the ground station team (NAMASTE) and having a discussion on how to proceed.
Personal:
The interpersonal issues are over with for me. I have removed myself from the path of destruction and as an element in a hypergolic mixture in the weak motor housing called AMSAT. Michelle has given me very good advice: get out of management and do technical work. We have settled the argument and I got in the last words: YES MAAM. I completely agree with her so the argument is over with for me. Other arguments will be done without me.
--- technical ---
GnuRadio, the software system, not to be confused with the USRP hardware, has a system in it call gr-pager. It uses a polyphase filter bank to channelize pager bands and then simultaneously demodulate the pager bursts when received. I have been adding the correct filter computations (the same ones I promised Matt and Eric some time ago ..... sigh) in my fbpoly branch. It is a pretty simple matter to take the signal front end and turn it into gr-acp-rx. The bpsk, qpsk demodulators are there. I am unsure about M-FSK, but it is simple to write and so gr-acp-tx should also be simple to write. With a simple prototype waveform (source coding, channel coding, packet structure, etc.) for each, we could have a live demo very quickly. Rick has been setting up subversion servers for multiple purposes on his servers. I thought I would put together a 2m-70cm subset of the ACP system, running at slower rates on the downlink and with fewer channels but have it ready to show at Atlanta.
Matt was kind enough to modify his 70cm RF board to do 70cm and in parallel. I do not think this will be even a lot of work to do and we can see a tangible result with this. 16-32 channels of uplink and map to TDM for the downlink should be achievable.
I will put code on the AMSAT subversion server. I would put it on GR but I don't want to argue about having to put FSF where AMSAT, Inc will need to go in the copyright. I am not suggesting that we follow this path. I am suggesting that it is a personal choice for me to do it. If it is useful to AMSAT, good. If not, I hope it will be a generator of ideas.
73's Bob N4HY
ARRL SDR Working Group Chair Member: ARRL, AMSAT, AMSAT-DL, TAPR, Packrats, NJQRP, QRP ARCI, QCWA, FRC. "Trample the slow .... Hurdle the dead"
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John B. Stephensen Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 6:46 PM To: Bill Ress; David Goncalves Cc: [email protected] Subject: [eagle] Re: what is going on?
I'd guess that the inter-personal issues can be resolved in a few weeks. Launch funding is the main issue and not just for AMSAT-NA. At Ham Radio 2008 the P3E update included the statement that "the cost quoted by Arianespace for the launch of P3E is outside the budget of AMSAT-DL."
73,
John KD6OZH