Luc Smeesters wrote:

A Belgian radio club in Jambes ON6NR, together with BYTECOM - an ARM representative in Belgium have organised the second official mbed Ham Radio Contest. The objective is to develop and document an innovative design with the mbed Microcontroller for use in an amateur radio application.

Each contestant must provide a project description including the motivation behind the project, the circuitry & associated peripherals and an outline/block diagram of the program (in C/C++, Basic for mbed or any other available solution). Submissions must be sent to either on5fm@uba.be or on5fm@dommel.be no later than 12am (GMT) 22nd April 2012. A jury of ham operators, embedded specialists and engineers will review proposals for concept quality, possibility of realisation, reproducibility, interest and usability. It will not necessarily be the most impressive proposals that will be selected, so all participants have an opportunity to win! The top ten projects submitted will all receive a free mbed Microcontroller to build their project. The projects not selected, are still invited to participate but will be required to obtain their own mbed.

The final project reports should be submitted via abovementioned e-mail, no later than 12am (GMT) 30th June 2012. It is a requirement for all projects to be operational and duly documented including, a technical article (in French), a video (i.e.YouTube), jpeg images and any other material to confirm the effective functionality of the project. The winners list will be published in QSP Revue August edition. The winners will receive a prize offered by the sponsors of the competition and a prize ceremony is planned for September 2012.

Projects will be published in the French amateur radio publication “QSP Revue”, therefore text and descriptions associated with the project must be published in French. The editor of QSP revue will provide some assistance to correct and review the contributions to fit the publication.

As usual with Ham radio initiatives, everything is free of charge. Apart from investigating the use of ARM 32-bit microcontrollers in Ham applications, one of the main objectives is to provide QSP Revue with quality articles, therefore project authors will accept copyright resignation and free of charge publishing of their contribution. Although the QSP Revue practice is not to accept advertising, the editor may accept some commercial text advertisements from project sponsors, if deemed allowable.

2011 Winner

The first prize last year was won by Xavier (ON5XAW) a student at the University of Liège (Belgium). Xavier implemented a versatile solution to permit digital communication using the D-STAR protocol associated to the Cubesat Project: Oufti-1.

The D-STAR Protocol The D-STAR protocol was developed by Japan Amateur Radio League to combine voice, data and video in a digital streaming protocol. D-STAR is currently able to establish radio links between portable transceivers via radio relays or connect via the internet. The Oufti-1 project implemented at the University of Liège is a world first; it is a functional miniature satellite (10cm cube) developed by students completing their Masters in Applied Science degrees, housing the electronics of a D-STAR satellite relay. The project is sponsored by the ESA and the launch of OUFTI-1 is expected in the course of this year.

Connecting with an orbiting satellite is not straightforward since the signal is affected by a frequency shift caused by the Doppler Effect. The D-STAR compatible transceivers sold by ICOM have technical limitations that are affected by this shift. Xavier’s project intends to offer Ham radio amateurs the ability to connect with OUFTI-1 while it orbits above the horizon. Further to this, the mbed/D-STAR module will not only solve the Doppler Effect restriction, but it will also allow most digitally enabled transceivers - not D-STAR compatible -to communicate with other D-STAR partners via terrestrial ways. In other words, it will motivate Ham around the world to actively participate in D-STAR communications and more interestingly with the soon to be launched OUFTI-1 experiment.

Building your own D-STAR Decoder

One of the contest rules imposed was that the contesting projects had to be fully operational and that all necessary information (in French) had to be provided to permit any interested readers to realise their own version of the design. Project files and associated documentation for Xavier’s module can be found here. The design files contain all information for building the Printed Circuit Board, the mbed source code and the necessary PC software to activate the D-STAR communication. Issue #20, April 2012 of QSP Revue features an article by Xavier providing an explanation about DSTAR protocol, theory of operation, implementation and circuit production. The mbed/D-STAR module roughly 100 Euros.

As shown in the videos, Xavier’s project is fully operational. All aspects of the mbed/Ham contest were upheld: A clearly described project, suitable for many potential users, an exceptionally well documented realization with all necessary resources and a proven fully functional system. Congratulations Xavier!
Objective Completed
Last year the contest achieved great innovation of the ARM mbed module from the French speaking ham radio community. Several articles were published in QSP Revue describing the various projects. Thanks to the sponsorship from ARM and Plantronics, the participants have been rewarded for their implementations. The initiative will be going on again this year and will allow global contributions.

Detailed information about the mbed QSP Revue Contest 2012 is published in the February issue. For inspiration, you can read all about last year’s entries, in past editions of QSP Revue and mirroring publications.

Luc Smeesters – Amateur Radio Station : ON4ZI Managing Director BYTECOM sprl/bvba