Hi John,
I'm definitely interested.
I'm a telecom engineer, with a PhD in transmission systems. Both my PhD and my engineering degree come from the Università di Pisa.
I currently work here (
www.idscorporation.com) with some responsibilities in radiocom and software-defined radios that I'll detail in the following.
The attached CV states all that, along with a list of technical publications.
My main R&D activity so far involved developing Software Defined Radios via techniques that can reduce their SWaP needs down to a manageable scale.
An article in GLOBECOM 10 discussing such ideas is here
some implementation results are demoed here:
Full-Software ETSI DVB-T Transmitter over Intel Atom N270
This is an ETSI DVB-T transmitter (the sort of thing that sends digital TV into our homes throughout Europe and in many other countries across the Globe) implemented on an ultra-small, ultra-weak Intel Atom CPU. I built it in the early days of my PhD.
Full-Software ETSI DVB-T Single Frequency Network on a Tabletop
These are two of those transmitters, in a synced transmit-network config.
Full-software ETSI DVB-T Receiver
Implementing from scratch these systems exposed me to transmission and channel coding techniques which, in the DVB-T rev.1 case, do precisely come from deep space transmission experiences dating back to the 80s (Voyager II) and reaching far into the late 90s. DVB-T2 stuff includes instead more recent codes (LDPCs) that are currently being tested and standardized by the CCSDS, for adoption by upcoming missions (I believe, eventually, even for actual deep-space contexts).
I'm highly interested in energy-efficient, energy-limited radio transmission systems (a.k.a. the most peculiar deep space comm requirement set).
After earning my PhD, and moving to my current company (
www.idscorporation.com), I led the development of a few SDR systems, including this:
IDS – GNOME system: an SDR-based GNSS integrity monitor
(it was actually presented and (partially) demoed @NAVITEC '12 in ESTEC)
and a ground receiver for ADS-B air traffic control signals. It's not that much of a relevant job (ADS-B radios are simple and --believe it or not-- almost uncoded) but we were very quick in getting the receiver done thanks to the flexibility of the SDR concepts.
As to recent research, together with a bunch of colleagues, I worked on a PHY-layer crypto concept called "directional modulation" in which I see some potentially significant SatCom applicability.
Directional Modulation is something that restricts access to information in certain (controllable) regions of the space surrounding the transmitting antenna. It does so by taking into account the spatial propagation of the radio signal and applying, based on such info, a multiplicative distortion process to the transmitted signal, that can (if suitably designed) render the transmitted info interdicted (and actually cryptographically secure) in unwanted regions of the space while leaving it unaltered elsewhere. It's not a replacement for traditional crypto but, i believe, it's a powerful complement to it.
With respect to previous literature in the field, which only applied the concept to legacy, very simple radio systems, we devised and demonstrated a way of putting it on top of state of art radio-transmission systems such as ETSI DVB-T1 & T2. Application to the satellite case (namely DVB-S 1 & 2) has no roadblocks.
The relevant article for the job that was carried out is here:
and here is a brief intro for a hands-on demo we did provide within ICASSP 2014
Still, within IDS, I led the spec. design and set up the testing procedures for the radio subsystems (both payload downlink radios and C2 radios. C2 in UAV systems ~= TT&C in spacecom) of our SD-150 HeRo UAV, which is this thing here:
currently being in a quite advanced development phase and looking forward to its "maiden flight".
I'm currently managing iterations with providers of the radio subsystem components to bring the whole thing as close as possible to our target spec. We're almost there, even if not exactly there yet.
I'm also taking care of some design issues for a set of smaller UAVs that the company is currently bringing to market.
Here SWaP constraints are what makes the job more difficult and relevant to some extent, even if radiocom requirements are quite a bit relaxed wrt the former (150 kg MTOW) case.
If this background is of some interest for SpaceX. I'm looking forward to discussing it in detail.
best
vincenzo
Vincenzo Pellegrini CV - Europass (1).pdf