SDRA in times of Covid
Friday, Feb 26 2021
Covid has a firm grip on all of us. We are banned from travel, banned from meeting and from an evening beer together. But we are not banned from being creative.
The HAMRADIO event in Friedrichshafen is still being planned as a on-site event, even though we doubt that it will take place on-site. There are way not enough vaccinations and there are mutations that are still cause of concerns. This is the reason why we have chosen a hybrid approach for the SDRA-2021, which will take place on June 26/27.
'Plan A' means that we will set up the SDRA as a remote conference. We will not require speakers to come to Friedrichshafen and record all the talks and presentations through a video conferencing tool. The conference itself will then be a pure online conference again, just as in 2020. We have been informed that the hall "Berlin" in which the SDRA used to take place, will be reduced in capacity to an audience of 27. But we strongly doubt that we will see 27 people there, if so. In any case, we are prepared for 'Plan B', to turn the SDRA and the entire HAMRADIO into a cinema festival, should it really take place. We are convinced that the real party however will take place in the internet.
Looking back to 2020, we must state that we had 1700 viewers, so compared to the 130 people in the hall the audience was 13 times as big. This means that the live conference on YouTube is for sure the right way. Our audience is a world wide audience, and we need to honor this. There is no doubt about it.
Another development is the close co-operation with the European GNURadio Days. Our agreement with the organizer, Jean-Michel Friedt from Besancon, is to have a distributed, but common approach. The two conferences will overlap and intersect. This means that particularly on Saturday June 26 we will contribute both to the stream and put a focus on GNURadio. Talks that are more on hardware and other topics will be more likely to be shifted to Sunday. And another insight from last year is that we will host the conference on afternoon only so that viewers from the USA (where a great part of the audience is located) will have a chance to participate.
The mode of the conference preparation is this: We are open for contributions by now and as soon as a speaker informs us about a camera ready state, we will arrange a contact with our video team. The video team will then arrange a recording assignment and record the talk. Later, on June 26/27 our speakers will come to a video conferencing tool again and the host will introduce the speaker, and then play out the prerecorded video. After the video, there is some opportunity to discuss the questions that have come in through the Youtube chat. The entire length of the frame is ideally 30 minutes, while there are exceptions for tutorials and topics that require more in-depth-consideration. Though, we prefer shorter contributions because of the properties of the online medium. As in the years before, we prefer presentations in English, while we don't exclude talks in German in cases a speaker is more confident.
So the 7th SDRA will take place on June 26/27 2021 and will open the stage for all enthusiasts, experts and professionals in Software Defined Radio, be them from academia, community or industry. The SDRA has the following goals:
- Support and drive institutional and personal research around Software Defined Radio
- Establish a conference where SDR developers can meet
- Attract Radio Amateurs and show paths into SDR
- Define a scientific format for talks, presentations and posters
- Define a publication platform together with the DARC publishing house
- Demonstrate modern radio technology to the interested public audience
Though we do not just want to address scientists, but the general Amateur Radio public. We welcome all contributions, tutorials, beginners' guides to SDR and the like. Even if you've never considered Software Defined Radio, we want to attract you as a listener with insightful information.
If you have conducted own research and experiments, please consider our Call For Papers:
https://2021.sdra.io/pages/call-for-papers.html
If you think that your research is worth demonstrating to an interested audience, feel free to contact us! We will be happy to help you with your publication. We are also happy about introductory talks that can help newbies to start into this thrilling and fascinating field of technology:
Email: sdra@darc.de