The SDR Makerspace is a joint initiative of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Libre Space Foundation, in collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland. It brings together makers, open source hackers, radio amateurs and researchers, to tackle the challenges in using software-defined radio for space communications, opening up development to a wide variety of people and organisations.
We were invited to participate at the SDR Makerspace Conference back in November, where makers, researchers, experts and industry came together for two days of talks and workshops. At this we presented an Introduction to LMS7002M, LimeSDR and Lime’s roadmap to 100GHz.
On the second day we hosted a hands-on workshop, where participants were provided with LimeSDR Mini hardware and got to build their own DVB receiver application, which was then used to view a live transmission from a Portsdown transmitter located in the same room. The app itself was packaged as a snap and provided an introduction to packaging for the SDR Satcom app store.
At the conference we also had the pleasure of being joined by Portsdown lead developer, Dave Crump, of the British Amateur Television Club (BATC), who gave a presentation on LimeSDR as an enabler for Satellite TV Transmissions.
We thoroughly enjoyed taking part in the conference and it was great to see such enthusiasm for using SDR in space applications, where it offers immense potential when we are able to democratise access to enabling technology and then bring together a diverse community of stakeholders to address the associated challenges.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank the organisers and notably our excellent hosts at HEIG-VD. We’d also like to thank Dave Crump of BATC for presenting and then assisting with the hands-on workshop on the 2nd day.
Finally, we’d like to note that there is still limited developer hardware available as part of the ESA supported SDR Satcom initiative and requests can be made via the online form.
Main image: SDR Satcom workshop, © 2019 Dave Crump.