Groundstation v.2.0

Antennas are backordered through next year, and my preferred vendor has made a business decision to no longer manufacture circular polarized antennas. This will have a minor effect upon the budget, but shoots the schedule right into the trash can. As I work up the build for the antennas, I will post details here and in other areas of ODE.

Do you know why your preferred vendor dropped circular polarized antennas? Is there a gap in the market now that might be worth exploring for revenue generation?

I get no answers from Gulf (my contact stonewalls), and the other vendors say they have shifted focus to HF (below VHF, not satellite comms), avoid the issue entirely, or forward me to a voicemail, which has not been returned in 2 weeks despite numerous contacts. Given the conversation I had with that procurement officer (my two hours of attempting to explain open hardware to a brick wall), I suspect designs got bought and production lines shut down.

While this would indeed represent an production opportunity, I am concerned about other implications of this "shortage". You can't use space unless you can communicate, and this would allow some level of control. That said, one would think that others would rise to the occasion to design and build them. I suspect that what we are seeing is the result of a strong interest by DoD in tactical field communications, and the resulting purchases. I have some supporting evidence for this suspicion I cannot discuss, but it is far from a sure thing.

For the 2.0 GS, I will be fabricating my own antennas taking care to make the designs easy to manufacture. Over the next few months since my income has jumped, I will be spending a good bit on upgrading the shop capabilities, so the manufacture of antennas of all types will be no great challenge, though the issue will be time. Given the nature of the way this whole thing seems to have come about, We'll talk more about this later.