 Hey, I'm Shannon here at Defcon 30 and I'm here at the Ham Radio Village with Eric and Justin to chat about what's going on this weekend. Personally, I am excited because I would like to introduce myself with my hand radio license call sign, which is KM6 FPP. So hello. Hello. What's yours? I'm AI0J. And I'm NHFCC. Nice. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. So there's a lot going on with the Ham Radio Village this weekend and I would love to kind of get an overview of the contest that you're doing and I know you're doing exams, probably talks as well. So let's go ahead and get started with the talks. What's some really interesting talks that are going on? Yeah, we get a great lineup for this whole weekend. You know, we have a bunch of very different topics, some sort of geared, you know, towards introduction. You know, okay, I have my license. What do I do with that? You know, as well as some more, you know, very much more into the Defcon spirit, you know, hacking Ham Radio software. Nice. You know, I think a 1200 bot over packet radio. Wait, what? Which probably hasn't been seen at Defcon since, you know, Defcon 1 or 2. I mean, okay, so I have a bail phone and I know that thing runs on really old software. So are we talking about like hacking software for radios? Yeah, hacking software for radios. Yeah. A lot of software is written for, you know, originally XP and a lot of people still run Windows XP. Oh, no. And I think there's been a few patches since then, but... You know nobody's patching this talk. Yeah, no, nobody. Oh my God, no. That's amazing. I can't wait to see that. And you have other talks going on as well? Yeah, we have all sorts of different talks. Like I said, we have some panels, you know, sort of like got my license. Very cool. What do I do now? A couple other different areas all about, you know, different exploring, different, you know, sort of areas of Ham Radio. It's a pretty wide field. Oh, absolutely. And we also have a contest going on. Yeah, we actually have... Fox Hunt. Yeah, two contests really in the village. So we have our Fox Hunt contest, you know, it's a Ham Radio gear. Fox Hunt is really designed to be very easy to do even with, you know, no prior knowledge. Yeah. You can, you know, just get a little antenna and just walk around and try to find the Fox. So we encourage people to come and try that. And I think we got, I think there's a special patch or badge or something for that if they solve that. Very cool. And then the Ham Radio exams are offering all weekend so people can come and get licensed, you know, for the U.S. as well as Canada and take their exams here. They count that as a contest. So it's a contest with the government, right? Yeah, absolutely. Now as somebody who has gotten into Ham Radio, one of the hardest parts for me was kind of getting over that entry level requirement and then figuring out where to go from there. So for somebody that's new to Ham Radio and really wants to get into it, is this a place that they could go and kind of understand a little bit more? Yeah, absolutely. They really try to gear the village to be open to everyone whether you know absolutely nothing about Ham Radio except that, you know, maybe your grandpa did it, you know, when you were young. Yeah. Or, you know, you're a seasoned, you know, military operator and there's maybe some new piece of equipment or something, you know, new that you just want to sort of discover more about. So we're going to have demos and workshops kind of running throughout the weekend, you know, just to play and experiment and, you know, people will just stop by and chat and really just kind of get their hands on. You going to have any antenna set up so I can actually get on the radio? Yeah, we're hoping to have a remote station so we can connect out. And unfortunately these hotels are built to be big Faraday cages. Oh my gosh, they totally are. That makes it a little challenging, but we're going to do the best we can. We actually hope to actually do some live operating from the outdoor patio here in the Flamingo. Very cool. You know, as well as just do some remote stuff over the internet and just have some demos inside the village. I can't wait to see it. Now, Justin, you've been kind of quiet over there. What's your favorite part? What's going on with you with the Ham Radio Village? I guess my favorite part of my mission in the hobby has been getting others into the hobby itself. It's done so much for me joining the Ham Radio Village, scholarships, career opportunity. It's been fantastic. So my goal is to get others into the hobby. Like you mentioned, it sometimes seems like it's hard to get into. Yeah, totally. But I feel like unless you have an Elmer, it's kind of hard to understand where to go after reading the main book about the exams. Exactly. Heavy Mentors is seemingly a big part of it. We're fortunate because we're mainly an online group. We meet once a year at DEFCON. Cool. But we have a Discord server website, hamvillage.org. And we all help each other out. So a lot of our stuff is geared towards getting people on the air, just like our exams. It's free. Anyone can come in and take the exam. They can take as many retakes as long as we're open. So we're here to get everyone on the air as much as possible. Very cool. Is there anything that we didn't touch base on that you would like to mention? Not much. I would just say come and try and do the license exam. It's free. Even if you've never studied and you just want to give it a shot, you can't have it in a long time because why not now? The air is very active here at DEFCON. 14658 megahertz. 14658 megahertz is the con ham frequency. Everyone listens in on it. I've heard some in my earpiece while we've been talking. It's quite an active frequency to learn about what's going on. I honestly agree with you when it comes to getting into ham radio. The first time I took my exam, I failed. And I'm okay with saying that because I sat right there in and I retook it. And I did great. You never know what questions you're going to get on the exam and you can always retake the exam. And that was a really exhilarating and really exciting process. Yeah. We actually had someone a couple of years ago when we were in Caesars. We were just doing the ham exams that year. And we had someone that was very determined to get their license and they failed. And then they failed again. And they failed again. I think they failed six or seven times. Wow. And they sat out in the hallway and they would not give up and they studied and they eventually passed. Yeah. So, I mean, anyone can do it, right? It's not rocket science or the insurable exam at all. Yeah. I mean, it's a fun hobby. And the more people that get into it, especially, you know, the crowd at DEF CON, it is much less traditional than the sort of traditional, you know, crowd. Yeah. So it's really nice to get that different exposure and just broaden the hobby. I agree. Well, I appreciate that you're both here. And ham radio is one of the things that really, really got me into hacking. So thank you for all you do. I'm so happy that I was able to talk to you today. And I'm definitely going to check out the village over the weekend. All right. Thank you. We look forward to it.