Press Release: IoT Hub SV Takes El Salvador to IAC 2026

Salvadoran research on community-driven access to space to be presented at the 2026 International Astronautical Congress in Turkey

The IoT Hub SV team, a community co-founded by OUTSIDE Tech and SVNet, will present in Antalya how a low-cost ground station and local talent development are connecting El Salvador to space.

San Salvador, October 2, 2026. Ludwing Aleman and Alonso Umaña, Senior R&D Engineers and members of the IoT Hub SV team travels to Antalya, Turkey, on October 3 to present its research at the 77th International Astronautical Congress (IAC 2026), held October 5–9. The paper, titled "Connecting El Salvador to Space: A Community-Driven Ground Segment Enabling Early Space Access," was accepted into the E1 Education and Outreach Symposium.

The research documents the experience of TinyGS_SV01, El Salvador's first ground station registered in the global TinyGS network. In operation since August 2023, it cost USD 44.99 and has logged more than 63,000 confirmed packets from low Earth orbit satellites.

One of its key findings is simple and replicable. Replacing the factory antenna with a handmade quarter-wave ground plane antenna, at a cost of about USD 5.48, increased daily reception roughly tenfold.

The study also reports training results. In August and September 2026, IoT Hub SV ran two ground station operation bootcamps at ITCA-FEPADE with 48 participants. All 19 groups built, configured, and registered working stations, and in the second cohort two of them received live telemetry from the Tianqi-40 satellite.

On the knowledge assessment, participants improved from 26% to 82% correct answers. This represents a normalized gain of 0.74, compared with the published benchmark of 0.48 for interactive teaching methods. The program earned an NPS of +85.

This participation is one of several strategic moves IoT Hub SV will pursue in the coming months to scale this learning model and bring aerospace knowledge to more young people passionate about the field. The effort aligns with OUTSIDE Tech's vision of creating technology with purpose, driving local technology development, and showing that El Salvador has great potential to create technology.

About IoT Hub SV

IoT Hub SV is a nonprofit technology community co-founded by OUTSIDE Tech and SVNet. It promotes technical talent development and projects in the Internet of Things and space technologies in El Salvador.