Phase 4 - Status update on the AMSAT Geosynchronous satellite effort
Presented by
Steve Conklin
Thursday
2:15 p.m.–3 p.m.
Target audience:
Community
Abstract
Phase 4 is the designation for Geosynchronous Amateur Satellites. AMSAT US is working to design, fund, build, and launch a geosynchronous satellite. This satellite will provide voice and data connections to amateur radio operators within the satellite ground 'footprint', and may have a large impact in enabling disaster communications from areas with no intact telecommunications infrastructure.
The initial effort is for a single satellite which will be stationed over the Northern Hemisphere, but if the project is successful it could expand to more satellites.
Steve Conklin is a member of the ground station engineering team. The goal is to design a complete ground station that is very portable and can be carried and set up by a single person, for under $1000 USD. The ground station is open hardware and software.
This talk will present project goals, current status, and projected schedule.
Presented by
Steve Conklin
Steve is a long time hardware and software hacker who has been working in open source since 2000. He has been employed to work on open source projects, by Red Hat and then by Canonical, where he helped deliver kernel updates for suported releases of Ubuntu.
Personal contributions to open source include maintenance of amateur radio applications and packages, founding of the Ubuntu-hams interest group, and creation of the PDD-emulate software emulator for an obsolete exetrnal floppy drive for Brother knitting machines. This helped fuel the growth in interest in knitting machine hacking and home knitting applications.
Steve also dabbles in rf curcuit design, signal processing, and machining.
Steve implemented the framework for tmtp-project, a batch mode proof-of-concept for algorithmic garment pattern design using concepts by Susan Spencer.
His current personal project is a CNC machine optimized for cutting fabric for small batch garment production, which accepts output from the Valentina open source pattern design application.