Thank you for Helping ORI Celebrate 6 Years of Open Innovation
Dear Friends, Supporters, and Fellow Innovators,
Six years ago, Open Research Institute (ORI) embarked on a mission to transform how we develop technology for citizen science and amateur space and terrestrial communications through open source principles.
Today, we celebrate not just our anniversary, but the extraordinary community that has turned this vision into reality.
ORI volunteers have spent these six years navigating a complex terrain between regulatory frameworks and technological innovation. We’ve built bridges between amateur radio enthusiasts, aerospace professionals, and open source developers—creating pathways where previously there were walls.
Over the past year, we’ve had several significant milestones:
Completed development on Opulent Voice, enabling innovative open source communications for amateur radio operators worldwide.
Successfully advocated for open source approaches at Federal and International levels, ranging from the Federal Communications Commission Technological Advisory Council (USA) to Open Source Initiative (international), and Open Source Satellite (UK).
We expanded our contributor base and board of directors, bringing diverse and talented expertise to our technical challenges.
We published multiple peer-reviewed papers advancing open source digital radio research in ARRL QEX, from space to drones.
We conducted a major workshop in Vancouver (DUM2024) that produced significant progress in Opulent Voice, and we were included in the University of Puerto Rico RockSat-X NASA sounding rocket launch at Wallops. The mission was successful.
Our approach to research and development continues to be grounded in careful domain modeling. This means understanding the fundamental structures and relationships in the communications designs before building solutions. This methodical approach has allowed us to:
1. Create reusable components that serve multiple missions, as seen in the modem module architecture for Opulent Voice.
2. Build technologies that truly serve our community’s needs by actively soliciting comment and critique.
3. Establish and use open standards that promote interoperability, flexibility, and re-use.
In Memorium
One of our milestones was quite difficult.
Frank Brickle AB2KT passed away in early February 2025 after a valiant battle with pancreatic cancer.
He was surrounded and supported by friends and loved ones, and continued to work and create and contribute until the end. He chose to leave us on his own terms.
Frank very generously agreed to be a Director of ORI in August of 2023. His advice on technical, regulatory, and organizational matters was excellent, tactful, clear, and deeply appreciated. All of us have benefited from his patient counsel.
Many of you know him from amateur radio, where his contributions ranged from designing DttSP (leveraged by HPSDR among many other projects) to Digital Spark Gap (as yet unpublished), a way of exciting all the HF bands in order to efficiently transmit data in an innovative way. And, plenty in between!
Frank explained polynomial spline modulation, synthetic aperture radar techniques, double-checked everything on the dumbbell antenna design, and made numerous suggestions for areas of investigation. He is responsible for our DUM2024 workshop being a success, which meant turning lemons into lemonade. That was just his style.
Frank was also an internationally renowned composer and music mentor.
We often hear “Together everyone achieves more”. Frank lived this. If he had a fault it was wanting to help everyone, all the time, at the expense of a more selfish focus.
The only thing he would want to leave behind is inspiration and encouragement.
Looking Forward: Our Next Orbit Around The Sun
As we launch into our seventh year, we’re focusing on:
End-to-end communications demonstrations for Haifuraiya. This is a groundbreaking initiative to design and build a fully open source HEO/GEO amateur communications satellite. Opulent Voice is a very large fraction of this work, along with the polyphase channelizer and the scheduling state machine that handles multiplexing between uplink and downlink.
Expanded International Collaboration. We have a goal to submit more regularly in JAMSAT and AMSAT-DL publications.
Regulatory work in advancing solutions to revive the 219 MHz band.
If you are an IEEE member and you qualify for senior membership in IEEE, then please let one of our Directors know? The ORI board can and will happily provide references for your application.
For more information on this please read:
https://www.ieee.org/membership/senior
Join Our Mission
The beauty of open research is that it grows stronger with every contributor. Whether you’re a seasoned RF engineer, a software developer, a regulatory expert, or simply passionate about open technology for space and terrestrial communications, there’s a place for you in ORI.
Visit us at https://openresearch.institute/getting-started to learn how you can participate in our upcoming projects and events.
Thank You
ORI’s strength comes from the interconnection of many individual contributors. To everyone who has contributed code, documentation, expertise, funding, or moral support: thank you for being part of this journey.
Here’s to six years of achievement and many more orbits to come!