LimeSDR Mini Hardware Donations from ESA and MyriadRF Announced

Thank you to European Space Agency and MyriadRF for giving Open Research Institute the opportunity to get LimeSDR Minis into the hands of some very amazing people doing open source space communications research and development.

ORI and Phase 4 Ground are very proud to present the following international recipients. We commit to supporting, enabling, promoting, and publicizing their work.

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Sahana Raghunandan, USA

As part of discussions at the 2018 GNU Radio Conference DVB-S2X Block Party, one of the functionalities of the demodulator that was identified as needing additional review and testing was the frame synchronization and symbol timing recovery loop. The goal of targeting LimeSDR is to modify and test existing GNNU Radio flowgraphs related to this subsystem of the demodulator. In order test this functionality independently, it is assumed that signal captures at the input to the baseband demodulator will be available.

Sahana Raghunandan is a researcher at Virginia Tech and an independent consultant focusing on satellite and terrestrial systems engineering including waveform design & implementation and interference analysis for spectrum management. Her experience includes design and FPGA-based implementation of waveforms for satellite broadband modems and satellite ground systems architecture with emphasis on modeling and simulation of cross layer optimization techniques. She has also worked on platforms and architectures for software and cognitive radio networks. Her research experience also includes design of modules for radar data acquisition, system integration of radar depth sounders and application of synthetic aperture radar techniques for ice sheet tomography.

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Jeremy Reeve, New Zealand

Jeremy has been working on VHF and L-band LNA designs. He has been running qucs simulations to look at optimum noise matching and stability circles and the like. His goals are to contribute RF hardware and baseband/FPGA content. He expects to be able to work with his educational institution to create a project that will result in quality open source publications.

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Edson W. R. Pereira, Brazil

Edson is an open source advocate and extremely active in amateur radio. He implemented a GUI (SDR-Shell) for Bob McGwier’s and Frank Brickle’s DttSP SDR, has contributed code for Joe Taylor’s WSJT-X, and has been a primary contributor on many other projects.

He is a lead maintainer for the Phase 4 Ground polyphase filter bank repository and is heavily involved with Phil Karn KA9Q’s development effort for multicast IP SDR innovations and implementations.

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Matias LU9CBL, Argentina

Matias is active in many areas of open source space communications. He is part of a groupworking to build a ground station design that supports a wide variety of satellite missions.

He has a SatNOGS ground station that is making rapid progress through the development portal. He is working to build and test antennas to add to this station.

He is active in his club station (LU4AA), which plans to run a station with an azimuth and elevation rotor from Yaesu, 2 crossed Yagis for VHF, and 2 crossed Yagis for UHF. Multiple fixed station will be added for remote control, and the station will be added to the SatNOGS network after it is functional.

Matias is active on SatNOGS forums and has a blog at lu9cbl.blogspot.com.
It is critically important to increase the number of stations and people involved in satellite communications from the southern hemisphere. Matias is deeply committed to publishing, sharing, and supporting others that are working in open source space communications.

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David Fannin, USA

David Fannin KK6DF works closely with Phase 4 Ground volunteer David Viera and wrote the code for David Viera’s LMX2594 oscillator and CW beacon project. David Viera demonstrated this system at GNU Radio Conference 2018 to great acclaim.

David Fannin has worked on a number of oscillator and SDR projects, his github account is https://github.com/dfannin, and he is committed to open source development in advanced digital communications.

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Open Research Institute and Phase 4 Ground are honored to be given the chance to put advanced software defined radio hardware like the LimeSDR Mini into the hands of active developers across the world. We are ready to help make the most of this very generous donation to open source space communications work.

-Michelle W5NYV

Hardware Donation for Open Source Space Communications Work – LimeSDR Mini Kits Available

Thanks to the enormous generosity of MyriadRF, Phase 4 Ground has some hardware help!

Five LimeSDR Mini Kits have been given to Phase 4 Ground for open source satellite communications development work.

We want to get these into as many hardworking hands as possible! Write me today with your need and let’s get you up and running.

I recently set up a LimeSDR Mini with GNU Radio with one of our list members and it went very well. This is a wonderful SDR. The LimeSuite GUI allows prototyping with what feels like every register setting on the controller. Performance is very good.

For a talk about LimeSDR (and the extended frequency range chip) from Microwave Update 2018 from Mike Seguin N1JEZ, please see https://youtu.be/F76BzezuCmw

LDPC-BCH decode on the FPGA is a current area of great interest for us. LDPC-BCH is the forward error correction for DVB-S2/X. But, we are also interested in doing more with Polar codes. There is at least one open source satellite payload project that has specified Polar forward error correcting codes. There is very little open source work here, it’s cutting edge, and Polar codes are specified for use in 5G communications. Polar codes are the first family of error-correcting codes that achieve the Shannon capacity for a wide range of communication channels with efficient encoding and decoding.

The FPGA on the LimeSDR mini is the Intel MAX 10 (10M16SAU169C8G 169-UBGA). How far can we take it?

What else needs doing? How about a SatNOGS station with the LimeSDR mini? A proof of concept of Phase 4 Ground authentication and authorization scheme? Handling the Generic Stream Encapsulation streams properly from the downlink for amateur communications? Plenty to do! Dive in and we will help you.

Contact Michelle W5NYV w5nyv@arrl.net to sign on and get kitted up.