Open Research Institute

04/18/2026

Arcanum (Open Source Conformal Method of Moments Wire Antenna Analysis Software) Update:

The NEC input parsing and phase 1 (geometry) are finished and pass unit tests, with the work that the community has done so far. This is an excellent achievement, but it needs to stand up under the sort of testing and expectations that someone exactly like you, a person reading out of interest in open source wire antenna models, would demand. In other words, it better work for you too!

Before we start phase 2 (electrical analysis), now would be a good time for amateur radio enthusiasts to try cloning the repo, reading the CONTRIBUTING.md markdown document, and making sure that the development tools can be set up as described and that you can run the tests and examples. This needs to happen without unnecessary pain or blockers.

If you are up to giving it a shot and you want to try this out, then it would make a very large difference. Why? Getting things right now pays off big later. Getting things right now means that the development environment and phase 1 results act right for you in the long term. It means that someone that does not have direct or insider knowledge of the design, and doesn't have anything set up in advance, can directly benefit. If it works for you, and passes tests, then we have met a major milestone.

Try it out and let us know how it works for you. Interested in contributing to phase 2? Welcome aboard!

Open Source MoM Solver for Antenna Design and Analysis - OpenResearchInstitute/Arcanum

04/11/2026

All the articles from our March 2026 newsletter are on the web here: https://www.openresearch.institute/2026/04/10/inner-circle-newsletter-march-2026/

Fancy PDF version (and all its friends) available here: https://www.openresearch.institute/wp-content/uploads/pdf_newsletter_archive/

All the articles from the March 2026 Inner Circle Newsletter in one place.

03/28/2026

The Case of the Missing Transmit Power, an debugging adventure.

The Case of the Missing Transmit Power

02/21/2026

https://www.openresearch.institute/2026/02/21/monument-peak-tower-collapse/

February 2026 Storm Takes Down Communications Infrastructure on Mount Laguna

02/05/2026

progress report. An interoperability milestone has been achieved, with the software (C++) modem successfully demodulating the hardware (VHDL) design. See the highlights from Remote Lab West.

This week's lab session sees the software modem start to work. Here's a video showing a few of the challenges that were defeated at Remote Lab West. Source c...

01/21/2026

Our most recent projects meetup video recording.

The Open Research Institute projects meetup for 20 January 2026 focused on OpenCPI, Opulent Voice, preparations for FOSDEM, and AMSAT-UK MDT SIC work. Aaron ...

12/21/2025

A year's worth of our full-color PDF newsletters can be found here:

The Inner Circle is the monthly newsletter of Open Research Institute, covering open source digital radio development, space communications, and community updates.

12/10/2025

Porting to a new FPGA is complete (Pluto SDR to Libre SDR). We are now transmitting over the air again in the lab.

A correlator has been implemented to replace the lower-performance Hamming Distance calculator for sync word detection.

Next up is soft decision decoding for the 1/2 rate convolutional encoder we are using for forward error correction. This will give us another 2dB of coding gain over the hard decision version, for a total of 7dB.

It's been a very successful end of the year for Opulent Voice. Thank you to all who support our work. We could not do this and other ambitious work without your help.

Do you want to support or join an ORI project? Then you are in the right place. Find mailing lists, Slack account information, and GitHub links here.

11/11/2025

Our Opulent Voice digital radio protocol is "Compressed but not compromised".

A video of a complete over the air demonstration of the system, including satellite simulator, will be published earlier than planned. Thank you to all the volunteers making ambitious happen.

10/26/2025

Here’s the figure from an upcoming article about optimizing Synchronization Words. Another solid contribution to open source digital radio from your friends at ORI. We discuss Barker codes, concatenated Barker codes, maximum length sequences and truncations, Zadoff-Chu sequences, metrics of sync words, and how we chose the sync words for Opulent Voice. See the draft article in our next newsletter.

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10/17/2025

Opulent Voice sent over the air with real Barker code synchronization words and basic framing is working great in the PLUTO SDR implementation. This is our uplink for and spacecraft.