 Testing one two three how's that good? I'm not allowed to walk around. I don't know why so we'll do the presentation from here Nice turnout. Let's show for Sunday morning testing one two three Testing one two three Thank you. Oh, I got a hold up here testing one two three. Is that okay? All right good Nice crowd David you want to get a headcount? Fifty excellent little more demographics. How many of you already here already have your ham radio license? 60% okay How many of you who didn't raise your hand or kind of considering it? 40% sweet I gotta add that as a metric. How many here attended this same presentation last year? Oh Sweet a whole new fresh crowd. This is gonna be fun Okay, my name is Orv. I'm W 6 B. I've had My ham radio license radios had cranks on the side of them like forever We're gonna talk about ham radio networking Relatively new they started out around 2010 is that about right Joe Joe Joe About when very good. By the way, that's Joe AE 6 XE. He's one of the Arden developers Oliver K6 OLA you're active in the thank you bro Valley Pasadena East I'm active in Ventura County Some of the slides and pictures here may be a little biased to Ventura County Don't take offense. Those are the ones I got pictures of some from Joe So anyway, we're gonna get started with ham radio networking. They call it mesh, but it's actually a bit of a misnomer The routing protocol can do mesh networking, but we use it mostly for route discovery The reasons on ham radio why you really don't want a lot of radios on the same frequency think pack at 30 years ago Anyway, the use is commercially available Wi-Fi access points We've come a long way since the beginnings and I have a photo of something from the early years. It's really ugly We take the Stock OS in the case of ubiquity at their OS and we toss it and install the slick Arden firmware that Joe and his peers have developed It's installed basically the same way as you do an upgrade with a few exceptions It's based on open WRT and you all know that was based on Linux way back when in the late 90s They throw away a bunch of stuff add their special sauces in there and good to go the other part of the special sauce is They figured out how to move the transceivers in the Wi-Fi access points out of the crowded part 15 band into the adjacent part 97 ham radio only bands and Tremendous increase in performance as you'd expect They use all SR for the routing protocol and it basically creates a ham radio internet Who can tell me the definition of an internet? nobody say The definition is a network of networks so all your subnets are connected together back in the very early days That was a big deal to get two networks connected together and the ham radio network is truly an internet with a lower case I because it creates a Specific 10.x subnet and your ham shack and it routes to all the other ham shack 10.6 subnet Anyway, let's talk about the ham radio Networking bands and these are basically the bands these you can buy equipment for You got 900 meg 2.4 gig 3 gig and 5 gig We don't do much with 900 megs For a number of reasons the gears expensive The bands noisy and we have limited bandwidth and it has a relatively huge Fresnel zone compared to The other bands if you don't know what a Fresnel zone is look it up Basically, it says it's bothered more by adjacent Things along the path much wider basically starts here gets large and then gets large again And this Fresnel zone is a function of the frequency So we don't use it much 2.4 and 5 you're probably familiar. There's part 15 allocations in there There's part 97 allocations adjacent to it You may not be familiar if you're not a ham with 3 gigahertz. There are no part 15 Allocation in the US Three gigahertz that's both good and bad We'll talk about that in a minute So anyway, here's the 2.4 Band and the 3 gigahertz band The blue stuff is part 15 It goes all the way up to channel. I think 11 But everything you see there the hams can use and in the early days of mesh networking We did in fact have to stay on channels one through six We had no capability of going going down lower And it was ugly because everybody and their grandmother had a wireless access point in that part of the band Sometime around 2015 They figured out how to persuade the transceivers to slide down to these lower channels I was part of the beta group that did that and the weekend We slid from I think we're using channel one down to channel minus two Instead of seeing 25 access points on my channel I saw the two guys I was talking to and the signal quality and SNR went through the roof That is 75% link quality. We had 95 plus percent Made a big difference and that's really about when this this stuff started taking off when you know Gear really started working well on a quiet channel Joe had a note on Mount Pleasant's Peak in Orange County and I operate one Managed one up on Sulphur Mountain, South of Ohio And we happen to move both move them down to channel minus two on the same weekend and they hurt each other 101 miles apart Now that's cool, but you don't want to make a network like that because the link was really marginal But it was nice to see what you can do with 600 milliwatts You'll notice in the three three gigahertz band, it's all orange. It's all ours. There's no part 15 as I said That's the good news. It's all ours. The bad news is they don't make any US equipment for it You have to buy export equipment for it and because it's limited in volume It's roughly 50% higher about yeah and going up. It's getting sketcher because the hams are glomming on to it And in the five gigahertz band, which is where a lot of the real let me go back Let me see how I go back Because the gear is more expensive, but the band is quieter. We use three gigahertz mostly for networking mountaintops For several reasons. It's quiet. You can buy nice dish antennas for there And there's no wisps Adjacent to you on that mountaintop wireless internet service providers Some of them are good neighbors Some are not you know, they'll do anything to find a quiet channel And they don't care about plopping down on your your ham radio If you happen to be sitting on one of the part 15 channels, which is legit, you know Because it's also part 97 channel So we deal with it anyway On five gigahertz. We've got all these channels to deal with they're all ours other than with And the ATVers who have camped out on a lot of the frequencies They're gonna have to They're learning they're learning the advantage of digital linking and they're coming around to see but right for right now We have to kind of tiptoe around their receivers, which are scattered everywhere But it's used a lot five gigahertz is So we got this cool ham radio network, but it's just infrastructure. It doesn't do anything You know like the internet with all the web servers turned off So what you need is all the services Services are you know things you can actually use connect to like keyboard to keyboard voice video Docs web servers and pages store and forward just plain old email and Anything you can do on the internet subject to the part 97 regulations There are a couple things about that. We have a lot more freedom and power and beam width and stuff like that Two significant restrictions and if you're hammy already know that we can't conduct a business on ham channels And the other one is back around World War two they put language in there says you can't deliberately Obscure content. You can't use codes or encryption. They're worried about spies German and Japanese spies Well spring forward to today Encryption is part of good networking practices. So there's a conflict there They a double or L knows it the mesh networking hams know it the FCC knows it They haven't addressed it yet. We've been told informally. Don't worry about it We'll get that we'll get the regulations. We'll drag them out of the 1950s into the you know current date. It hasn't happened yet Most people are doing mesh networking. Don't worry about it too much Yeah, you can't well you can't you can't broadcast the word is broadcast Your your your data is intended to be for a destination Well, we do broadcast, but hey part of networking So anyway quick and dirty none of the applications I'm going to show you here are unique except the fact that none of them are using the internet These are all RF based not everybody uses all of them Some people use different applications It's nice because it's an internet. It's a standard protocol and areas can Standardize on whatever they want for any of these applications. So in our area We use IRC good old-fashioned IRC. We have four IRC servers Across Santa Barbara and Ventura County is linked together just for chatting It works fine. We can use a native client. Some guys have spun up the web client like Kiwi IRC There's a chat application called mesh chat one of the hams that's associated with Arden wrote it up initially spun it up on The node itself it turned out the nodes are fairly resource limited the older ones And you could run them out of RAM pretty quickly if the chat got busy So he ported over to the Raspberry Pi and that's that's how 99% of the people deploy it now I've got screenshots of these Matter-most is a kind of an open source equivalent slack Keith told me they use that extensively down inland empire where he's at I got a picture of that and Others like I don't know slack is commercial and any other check facility you want to spin up in your area works Here's a very hard to see example of IRC. It's typical, you know Channel here's a mesh chat example. This is when the Trevor put up with the keys If a mesh chat Server happens to be offline when it comes back online it will catch up with all the messages that it didn't receive and it will sync them up That's why they had to move over to Raspberry Pi with more storage It works pretty well. We tried it and we don't work use it in our area a lot of people do Here's a picture of Matter-most It's a Typical web-based chat thing in our area The guy who runs one of the IRC servers figured out how to run a Matter-most a demon and he's got a link to IRC So we can communicate between the two What's it say they say about standards the nice thing about them is there's so many of them to pick from So anyway, fortunately it doesn't impact as long as you settle in a local operational group on what you're going to use So Voice over IP not a big deal, right? Everybody uses it on the internet. It's it's a bigger deal over ham radio This picture is almost five years old now before we deployed on the left is an old ebayed Cisco thing, I don't know 25 bucks or something on the right is a grand stream VoIP PBX It's based on asterisk The guy who is deploying the VoIP network was not then Comfortable with Linux. I don't know if he still is but he wanted a more turnkey system and this has a some nice Web-based configuration utility, so he was comfortable with that So we dinked around with that a little bit and finally installed it Can you see it here? It's right right there most of the stuff is analog FM gear and linking repeaters although the 24 port Ubiquity switch under here has since been upgraded to a 48 port because we ran out of ports crazy So spin forward to recent times We've upgraded to grand stream phones because they're more controllable and configurable with a grand stream PBX and Again ebay 35 bucks and there are better versions of grand stream phones Some have nice LCD screens some of them you can have a web browser built in all that stuff And you can see that well me maybe not see I have missed a call and somebody left me a voicemail You'd be surprised how often my bat phone rings So there's other types of VoIP and we find we're using this a lot We use team talk kind of servers that the gamers used to keep in touch with each other he got Team speak and there's is it mutter or mumble mumble We settled on team talk because it does not encrypt data It's just one less hurdle Early on asked the mumble developers about disabling Encryption and they told me to go take a hike But it's open source and I suppose somebody can get there and you know hack an option, but this works for us It's free. It's not open source So anyway It's pretty slick you can do one-on-one channels Chat rooms You can set up as many channels as necessary And the cool thing about it is how many of you listen to an FM repeater, right? Somebody's talking on it. You have to wait for them to finish talking You can have multiple simultaneous conversations on this if you want to talk with somebody you double-click on an unused channel They double-click on it. You're over there your chat away when you're done. You come back No big deal Most of the conversations run of 24 to 34 kilobits per second when you're talking So that's that's like nothing You can use a speaker microphone or a USB headset just gives you excellent audio While we're talking about audio member ham radio's communications grade 300 to 3000 kilohertz and For some of us are getting a little older. It doesn't Sound quite as good as it could the codex in teams team talk will run as good as your your Your connection will allow between you and the other guy and With good headsets on and the level suggested is like he's in the same room. It's just a delight to listen to Unless your link isn't good enough and you hear dropouts That's a that's a that's really annoying on a white phone call or one of these That's a real incentive to upgrade your link to the mountaintop push to talk On our weekly nets. I put the headset on close the doors and turn on Vox and put my feet on the table Just chat. It's really great In an emergency situation you could envision To EOC's or EOC in a hospital or something with this in a quiet room open mic Both ends Somebody just walks up and says hey bill and fees at the other end some it's wait I'll go get him and just hands off in addition to just chatting. It does desktop sharing file sharing What else oh, yeah and video let's talk about video This is not your father's ATV where you get to go one at a time There's six video streams These are fairly low resolution. I think these are all 640 by 480 and we keep it down at 10 frames per second The green over there is the person that's actively talking And then when you stop talking it turns yellow for a few seconds then goes away that person that talked Um Works very very well server runs on the raspberry pi. I Watched it while we loaded it up with six and it was doing 10 to 15 percent CPU utilization Bandwidth occupation with a mega bit per second a little more Now obviously if you try and push HD through it six of them at 60 frames per second It'll roll over and die, but this is fine We have a lot of fun with these nets Highly recommended as an application and I I try Puretically to abuse it as much as possible get people running up many people as possible running video Notice any issues stuff like that. That's true with any piece of gear you might use an emergency situation that's why you run nets and ORT's and stuff like that and go exercise the gear that might not normally get exercised so webcams and video Some various screenshots in here The guy in the foreground is Ben AI 6 yr. He'll be given a presentation this afternoon on Open-source software you can use during emergencies disasters This is a number of years ago. He belongs to the Canale Valley amateur radio club out thousand oaks area They were Setting up for field day a few years ago when he threw a webcam up there and threw it on the network And this is a picture a screenshot. I took about 40 mile total path link Seavark set up about seven miles away from my QTH, but to through through two sets of hills So no way you could get there direct, but it works fine. I want to talk about this a little bit This is an open-source application called I spy let's just watch any number of simultaneous video streams highly recommended Unfortunately, it's only open-source on Windows. They keep waiting for somebody to port it to Linux But it hasn't happened yet and no it doesn't run under wine I tried so upper left is Glenn W6 GMB's tower camp don't ask me why he put it up. I don't know Upper right was just the first webcam. I ever put up. It's just my driveway big deal But it was proof of concept and I never took it down lower left is Our seamy west site. It's at a water tank site the west end of seamy Valley looking pretty much do north The one on the lower right Was on Chatsworth Peak. It's between Ventura County and LA County as you go up over the sentences and a pass And it happens to be looking about West Northwest If you look very carefully You can see a layer of smoke here that was from the Thomas fire Up to this point in time We've been just throwing up, you know, cheapy fixed focus pointed cams here and there just for the fun Whatever we had laying around or was cheap One of them happened to be on Sulphur Mountain just south of ohai and it happened to be looking roughly east Where the Thomas fire broke out About six weeks earlier than this Ben ai6 yr had dropped me an email said hey Here's a Document on how to stream webcams up to YouTube Well, I had a he asked me to take a look at it See if I could make it work because I had a machine that could speak mesh here and the internet here So you pull it down and stream it back out convert it through ffmpeg and stream it back out Well, I got it working and he says good put it away. We might need it someday. Well six weeks later He pinged me at I don't know Six o'clock at night something like that said hey, we got a fire breaking out now The wind was just howling. That was a terrible fire Well the webcam On Sulphur Mountain was a different model The server up there was not Linux. It was Windows I had RDP into a get ffmpeg installed figure out how to run it But within about 20 or 30 minutes. I had this going streaming to YouTube We streamed for about an hour and 45 minutes and then we lost power at an intermediate site They didn't have battery backup. I mean who expected widespread outages, but the wind was just howling after this video stream stopped I The fire progressed from right to left right across the north edge of this property and wiped it all out and Proceeded west of Ventura and wiped out. I don't know a good percentage of Ventura very bad fire About four days after this happened I got an email from a firing spec fire inspector from the Ventura County fire department Asked me for this URL because it was stored up on YouTube. I gave it to him Never heard back from him directly But I did hear back from various sources that it was the first video they had of the fire You know it was within 30 minutes of it breaking out and that they found it useful in some way So since then Here's the deal Ham radio repeater sites radio sites are frequently on sites where there's no commercial or governmental presence as such a camera There could have a unique view of an incident So we're going back and taking out the old fixed ones fixed view cameras and putting in pan-tilted zooms We have facilities for recording them remotely not on site yet And we're trying to push mesh nodes out to higher sites and we try and put a pan-tilted zoom out everywhere We put a new site And it came in useful There's a wooly fire viewed from a camera on North Simi Valley Stream this to YouTube also. We did not have a camera closer at that time still don't We hope to get one on razz no peek and you know all the all the other developers You know implementers are doing likewise. Joe's got a great one up on Pleasant's Peak And I think that Don K6 BXT has one down in Orange County one or two or three or four. I don't know I Have enough to worry about in Ventura County But the point is this is of real value and when you when you stream it out to YouTube and you say this is from a ham radio Network they really really conscious of the value of it and it's not just the public a lot of the safety Agencies have become aware of it and are actively negotiating access to our cameras and Possibly helping implement access to sites that we might not normally have access to so this is going to be mutually good anyway Some of the app other applications Anybody ever played with etherpad? It's kind of a Google Docs wannabe anybody ever edited a Google spreadsheet or Document I mean everybody has right you ever done it concurrently with few other people It's kind of spooky Well either pad can do the same thing concurrent editing multiple authors Take currently text and tables only But here's kind of a example the different colors are different editors It's it's being supported. It's not being actively developed. We spun it up tested and it worked fine. Okay It's available if you you thought that might be a useful So email we said, okay, we're just going to use SMTP, you know standard email store and forwarding. It's the platforms We're spinning up a few standards and mail servers Mail is its own unique complicated annoying topic If you're deep into it, please get your ham radio license if you don't already have it. We need you There's a ham radio specialized application called wind link express and another part of it is rms express rms relay They're designed for low data rates like HF 300 bod For you younger ones a bod is roughly equivalent to one bit per second That's 300 bits per second And that has to be that way because the ham radio HF bands are so much narrower. They're very tiny. I mean The entire 20 meter handband is about 1 tenth of a 5 gigahertz channel That's it And you got to share it with a bunch of other ham So this 300 bod stuff is it probably running in one and a half or two kilohertz of bandwidth But they can pass traffic long haul if there is no communications out of an area 40 meters or 20 meters could link up to another wind link station far away and and forward it from then they're on on the internet and They also use packet which is 1200 bod the ancient bell 202 modem protocol to tone And I'd use 110 big deal good riddance But the point is VHF packet generally uses FM modulation you feed it into the microphone and Relay around at 1200 bod Regionally and it works quite well a lot of the I don't know what they use another is we used 220 packet for when link forwarding in Ventura County. We've got a few of them set up on IP networking and Their comment was boy does it forward mail fast And that 10 10 million bod I just picked that number out because you know, it's way faster No, but the point is it's so fast that? it doesn't need to be any faster and If you use wind link and others well in our area they have standardized forms for message handling I'm sure other areas have forms like that, but you can pull it up fill out standardized form attach it forward it That's how they do it. I think so. I don't yeah, Oliver saying yes. I I don't use I'm an infrastructure guy. Sorry So anyway, it's just a quick screenshot of rms express. That's the end-user application right rms express Yeah, okay, Oliver was saying that they've upgraded in its wind link express now I think I changed that on the notes. I forgot to change it on the slide so Some of you are a little older remember the old icky dial-up days and DOS and modems and bbs's Well spring forward and you have citadel bbs Which is web-based all in one you have your calendars chat rooms Messaging it's SMTP compatible Runs fine on a raspberry pi. I say that a lot almost everything. I've shown out here runs fine on a raspberry pi And that's another thing. We almost Automatically deploy at a site Weather station. This is kind of a washed-out view. This is my weather station Running on a raspberry pi and the application software is we wx we w e e w x I can't say enough good things about it. It supports its open source got an active development community runs on four or five different OS's supports just about every weather station known to man and then some We wx w e e w x This has happened to me my ground station, but there are a couple of sites We're going into where they have weather stations up there And they feed it into their packet network and we'll get a USB splitter and bring it out onto the mesh network also So remember I told you that Counter 12 years ago. It was pretty much a roll your own DIY mesh networking Here you go so Initially, the only thing it ran on was a link says WRT 54g 2.4 gigs take it or leave it part 15 only One transceiver non-mimo Num receiver 60 milliwatts You had to run it through Lossy coax through external antennas And if you've got ten five or ten miles Bob's your uncle, you know, you were you were styling Those days are long gone fortunately And if you have a stack of these in the corner, they may be heavy enough to hold a door open, but that's that's about all they're worth for So Spin forward to today This is a ubiquity power beam. I think this is the m5 300 The computer at the Ram the ROM to transceivers all in that little pod in the center Transceivers are dual polarity running Nemo, which means two data streams Which means for any given signal to noise ratio. This will have double a throughput of a non-mimo device pretty slick 600 milliwatts not 60 milliwatts 23 DB gain and I if I did the math right that's a hundred and twenty watts ERP Don't gaze lovingly into the feed point when it's on Unless you like early onset cataracts Seriously With these high-gain dishes walk away around them or if you got a work facing them power them down The ADAR world probably doesn't emphasize that enough But now that we're using this a lot more commonly and probably 2.4 gigs also just use caution 80 bucks something like that. Yeah Maybe you saw one of these at the Arden booth. This is a micro tick LDF 5 Lightweight dish feed Yeah, like dish feed IBM is raffling these off put it put your ticket in and if you don't win 38 bucks What it's only got 60 be gained something like that 6 8 it's not much But what it's meant for As you get yourself an old direct TV dish take the LNA out slide this tighten the thing and Once again, Bob's your uncle 23 DB gain or something like that. You can reach out and touch somebody You can reach out and slap somebody with this So I've got a couple older slides to show you Can you see the little blob of white at the top of the mast that's a nano station m2 They're not about yay big nice little devices 8 dbi gain dual polarity 600 milliwatts This is what we put up before we could get the dishes Same price and this is an older one and that's how high he had to get it to reach me three and a half miles away Direct we don't do that anymore You have to consider these things like you consider handy talkies You don't talk to somebody with another handy talkie direct pretty much ever What are you at quarter mile? Maybe? These are low power Line of sight things so you end up talking to them each other to everything through a mountaintop relay point With voice. It's an FM repeater With these it's just another node so this guy who had this mess this is an old photo He's lowered it to 35 feet, and he's got a power beam on top of it So here's another picture Can you see the nano station about five feet off the roof? He's got a five mile link. He had a really good signal problem easy to put up Here's another one just clamped to the second story ease You'll notice there's two of them. There's a nano station m2 on two gigs and an m5 on five gigs. Why? Well, it'll pick the better path, and if one goes away, it'll fail over to the other one Every EOC in hospital. We're deploying to we do this For redundancy Ideally you can go to two different sites, but if not you go to a site that has both of them So if you have a hardware value, you can stay on the air Highly recommend it stuff's not expensive So what do you talk on the hilltops with? This is a picture when a Joe cited a site that will remain kind of nameless. I guess This has been up four or five years now You know battery powered 2.4 and 5 gighertz To 3 and 5 Yeah, North Orange County. Is that close enough halfway up Saddleback. This is a small site Here's your medium site Camery Hills FM repeaters links and Somewhere on there. There's a crummy little local m5 that I have a replacement scheduled for That's your medium site. Here's a large site This is sulfur mountain again FM repeaters and stuff and that's me up there Okay, and here's a really large site. This is Pleasant's Peak This is a commercial site that Joe was fortunate enough to have access to and all that stuff in yellow is his You know I'm saying how cheap this stuff is Well about fang handy talk is cheap, too But what you're talking to is not cheap because it's higher quality. There's more of it Joe just sort of rough guess how much money do you have on that tower a couple thousand dollars? Props to him for funding that but as we blow this stuff stuff out farther groups are gonna have to support it because There's a lot of stuff involved in deploying this if you get up to a repeater site that's already got a tower and A battery backup and a friendly repeater owner you can sneak your way in especially when he learns he can links repeaters digitally using either DMR all-star I think and there's a some standalone boxes that do ROI P repeater over IP Basically analog and push to talk in and out one side and in and out the other side and you link them together via IP They're designed for internet, but mesh networking is cool, too Yeah, yes, we have presented to papa not out in our direction yet. They don't have any presence in Ventura County yet Although I'm told San Diego Riverside Yeah, yeah, oh doesn't cover Ventura County too well Yeah Yeah, also the darn system has been very cooperative in letting us hide right on their microwave links Yes, can we do some Q&A first? Let me get through it first. Thank you So anyway, this is how tall is the tower Joe? And a hundred foot tower lots of coverage there. Oh, there it is Joe is showing pictures from that yesterday on the booth So when I did this presentation last year This was our presence and this is not a hand-drawn map by the way This is active mapping software developed by Eric KG6 WXC He's in the Port Winimi Um Green is links gray is tunnels. We'll talk about that There's some other colors and the colors in the nodes are denote different frequencies or functions The nice thing about it if you have the map online and I can I can demo it you can click on the node and it'll pop Create a pop-up that shows you all sorts of information Because he can pull the node the JSON file He can tell you what version of software is on it who it's talking to with the caveat There's a place in the node for latitude longitude Every node he can contact Is in the database, but he can't place it on the map if there's no lat-lon if there is It can tell you the bearing and distance to each of those links just some that pop up And that's open source software. He has his own github repository There are about a dozen instances of it running and it's useful as hell because I download a CSV of it and run Metrics every month on our site So anyway This is March 2018 and this is March 2019 and they're not quite the same scale I zoomed out to show all the way down to the Mexican border, but you can see that it's a lot denser now We've made a lot of progress in the last year So anyway I'm in that mapper There's about 500 nodes Now a lot of those Well here. Let's talk about that Obviously if it can't get to it to pull it it doesn't know about it. So there are Some RF islands, you know some guys in a town get together they link four or five things together But if their nodes don't make it out of town to something else on the backbone, and we won't know about it a lot of those people Establish what we call a tunnel to somebody else Excuse me who's running a tunnel server that way they get access to the backbone The Arden guys implemented that it's over the Internet. It takes a little bit extra hardware not expensive But if you're out there all by your lonely and want to get some experience with meshing ask somebody The forums in your neighborhood your area if they can support a tunnel to you. It's usually one or two volunteers So those 500 nodes in there a fair chunk of them are via tunnels and The Arden folks and everybody else understands that in an emergency the Internet may go away so they Impress on everybody Make sure that all the services you need an emergency You're not depending on an Internet link for them Make sure it's an RF link and like any other emergency service your nodes better be on a battery backup on that hilltop And it better have a generator or solar to keep it going and the Thomas fire up on sulfur mountain It's AC plus solar Plus batteries AC died very promptly Ash covered the solar panels and batteries went dead in a day and a half What are you going to do? What you got to be as prepared as you can don't depend on something that won't be there And we do the same thing with the EOC's they always have battery or generate power make sure you're plugged into it and Radio rooms and hospitals Our county EMS has the same thing. We just implemented out there Finishing it up. So this is what you can get from Arden at Arden mesh org software downloads Links to the github a link to the github repository the how-to the FAQs all this stuff here If you're interested to recommend Create an account for yourself and just browse the forums Most useful feature is new posts in the forum since you last logged in if I check it Couple times a day to see what's going on. It's gotten quite active in the last year In addition to the standard released software. Oh, I got to talk about that, too What's happened since the last presentation they moved to github in March of last year about a year ago Did a production release in September 2018? And that was a big deal because the release before that was two years old and it's getting quite old number of known bugs Since then they started doing nightly builds that are available if you're adventuresome and honestly 99% of them were quite stable. We only found One or two nightly bills that had to be pulled back in a year Good stuff and all the good stuff It's in the nightly builds I did an inventory last night in the in the github. There are nine bugs showing none or show stoppers They're just annoying little junk and 30 enhancement requests So if you're interested in coding and I got a ham radio license, they could use your help The nightly builds were rebased a month ago two months ago on late latest open WRT with hundreds of Patches and fixes and stuff and so and that's been quite stable. You know They just rolled their ardent stuff back on top of that And I think we're going to do a production release in a month or two Getting close getting close got a couple more tweaks to do. This is good stuff. Oh Remember links this WRT 54g only They now support more than 50 diet devices across micro trick ubiquity and TP link you can mix a match They have similar but not identical feature sets Some of them are more cost-effective than others so you can shop around Been buying you ubiquity sector antennas for I don't know about a hundred bucks Something like that and then one of the guys tip me off to all telex and they got a sale on theirs I got them for 30 bucks each Plus 20 bucks shipping, but you know still So yeah, it's this is not like buying an HF radio for you know, three grand So if you want to want no more if you want to do a deep dive in Generally, how you write software for an ad hoc wireless network Joe's gonna have a presentation right here at 430 What's happening locally? I asked the guys To send me some input on what they're doing Andre's down in San Diego. He's adding coverage to Poway rancher of San Bernard Rancho Bernardo Putting up San Marcos peak temporarily and to get till he gets his node running on double peak Then he'll link through Mount Palomar and have coverage from ocean sides of La Jolla So they're they're planning on adding coverage a lot of places And I was thinking about Mount Laguna that'll go down to San Diego County and Brawley Imperial health central Keith is in an empire Eatham Hill is coming up or is up Is up. Okay. This is about to we fold Um Link to snow peak Link to Toro peak. I'm just reading all this stuff Hemet Ramona bowl area else on our peak Pine Cove Marion Ridge in San Bernardino Links to heaps peak John KJ6 easy is he here? He didn't say hi. Okay. He's fairly new But he's working on getting corona up on the air. These are his projects. There's a I had to look up Grape Hill It is a hill right near the 91 15, but he's gonna link to pleasant speak and then distribute it out He's being funded by the PD. So they're gonna Push some stuff out to two sites and their PD and then their van He's coming up to speed nicely and Mine we have like every other place gaps in our coverage I'll be doing site surveys for Western Moor Park We have a site I'm gonna look at that will cover most of Thousand Oaks most of the Canal Valley Red Mountain is halfway north between Malibu and Ohai. It's just west of the 33 It sees down into Western Ventura and up into Western Ohai Valley, and we've been given permission to Deploy there and the Vitaer Association said we'll pop for the money Thousand bucks very generous of them Here's some references Arden mesh org The mapper is at mapping that kg 6wxc.net mesh map If you want to know what kind of coverage you have hey, what's that comm is good for quick and dirty and Oliver likes Radio Fresnel Fresnel comm And if you want more specific information on sites Don K6 vxt runs OC mesh org a lot of good information there needs to prune some of the older information out of there, too There's some of it's getting a little stale P. Buck the club slash mesh is a site. I maintain for Ventura County. I have a table there of nodes, but oh Everybody done taking pictures, okay Where's my finger who doesn't have a ham radio license? Who's thinking of getting a ham radio license? Oh sweet sweet sweet. So you need a license There's now only three levels of tech like a ham radio license. So used to be five at least five Tech is considered entry level, but it's fine. It has lots of privileges At ARL.org there's a whole thing on getting your technician license How to get it? There are study guides available. The test is 35 multiple-choice questions And V they're they're tested by V's volunteer examiners. There's a question pools Those V tests are going on as we speak all day. I don't know where do we know where? Okay Ballroom Divide a okay over by administration or registration. Thank you. Okay. Good Um, okay Just ask somebody will show you Jim a g6 if who's also a big mesh guy from Riverside and Temecula he's conducting it. He rounded up some feces and blesses solar. I assume they're out there qualifying people I Know they've had anywhere from 35 to several hundred people at these sessions throughout the whole day If you're ready to get your life take your test, you know now's as good a time as any If you don't take it today A double has a list of all Groups to do it and where they're located. I think you can put in your zip code or something Or ask at your local ham radio club and if you don't know where your local ham radio club is There's a database of them at ARL.org Minimal cost for the test I'm told that's only if you have to re-take it They're out there are a lot of charge for media and materials and that's about it. Okay 15 bucks You know considering some of these ham spent thousands of dollars on their stations. I don't I don't think I could well I could spend thousands of dollars on mesh network equipment, but it would all end up on mountain tops So anyway tech license has voice voice privileges on VHF and UHF. Those are the FM repeaters Put a mobile radio in your car and go around talk to people The repeaters are a line of sight so up the mountain down the other side But many of them are linked together massive massive Systems of repeaters that you can go like everywhere So that's good too. And also you have HF privileges on 10 meters Which is these days pretty much a line of sight anyway in this part of the solar sunspot cycle But when there are openings you can work all over the world on 10 meters with just a few watts I'm here till 530 For the recording Pass it around Go ahead So once you get part of this mesh network or the the RF internet What does that get you during a disaster? Assuming your home station say it stays up I Have a VoIP phone Why is minister the system you wouldn't want to do that Communications, you know if you don't have a powered phone you won't have any FM radios either Most of the focus during disasters will be like EOC's and stuff like that If you want yours to say up you have to be you know prepared It's all about emergency preparedness. It's the same stuff you do with FM Well Let me go and then you pass it over there So what type of equipment do you need to interface to one of these meshes if you're just starting out? Oh, great question. Here's the deal This thing goes up on your tower pole or whatever One ethernet cable coming down to we injector going up and an ethernet port Plug your computer into that and it forms a unique network. This is not your house network You need a dedicated computer. Okay, plug it in wire boot it up. It has a DHCP server You'll get an address and it has a DNS server any link you click on on your the your item show a picture of the interface It's just a web interface with links to other sites and other services. I should add that It will know how to get there It's just a DNS server. It sees the broadcast from the all SR go ahead Well, just to add to this because I'm with Aries lax northeast and we do a lot of mesh and We see the value one of them is The infrastructure for the other part is the user part So we invest heavily in go-kits So what we want our operators to do is to come out put up a mesh node connect to maybe a gateway An infrastructure note or to another mesh node Just build it want from one hospital to another and then you add voice over IP video you can and you know I show this during the presentations All of us in M.com know what this becomes in it in a disaster, right? It's a brick What mesh has done what or would or if and everybody working on mesh has done is they've unbricked these for hams And every time I give that presentation to EOC's to fire departments and whatnot We can actually show them what the problem is like or show it showed earlier the fires We don't have to describe it. There's a three-story building on fire. It's like no here's a picture and they can make those judgments So it adds to the voice in addition to data win link, etc. So For those for the camera that can't see Oliver. He's holding up his cell phone Which is a part 15 device what you do is you put a part 15 access point onto your mesh network That gives your phone access to the mesh network and that gives you a lend phone for VoIP Video viewing, you know, it's a part of the mesh network then and it's absolutely brilliant So we've used this out in the desert at Baker to Vegas and there's absolutely nothing there And we've been able to tunnel back in and I was thinking was and it blew us away Because I was thinking was if we can do it out there outside of Shoshone There's no water that ten porta-parties that's all you have no water no electricity then we can do it in any kind of disaster It's a game-changer on every front and it's not Replacing what we can do on HF or VHF UHF. It's enhancing it in a big way. So I do invite you to really have fun with this and we do a whole lot of sessions as well if you live in the area and It's it's a lot of fun So if you're interested in some training and whatnot, we do do regular workshops So hit me up afterwards and thanks Joe by the way this part 15 addition that you've done to the HAP has been a lifesaver I didn't mention that a microchip makes a little five-port box not an outdoor box It sits on your on your on your shack desk With the Arden code loaded in it It's PoE and PoE in on port one and plug it into your home internet And it provides internet access to anything else that's plugged in there the three center ports are DHCP from your node Or from that if you want and port five going out is DTD and you run that up to your node In addition, there are two internal access points. There are a five gig and a two gig So you can spin those up for local part 15 access if you want so Happen let me get it Stand by I can but I was going to show them a picture Yes, there you go This thing is like the Swiss Army knife of mesh network. It's not on the display. Oh My bed. Oh, I can't oh, yes, I can and by there you go. There's the model number down there I don't know if you can read it. I can read it off. Oh, there you go Very useful 24 volts in 24 rolls out Yeah, does it just pass through just pass through 10 through 30? I mean, this is pretty much the second thing you buy when you do the mesh networking now It gives everything on your mesh network Internet access, but it doesn't broadcast it out unless you want it to Did I miss anything about it Joe? Yeah, PoE power over ethernet Pass the microphone. I had I did have a question. I was waiting for you to finish So I want I'm curious as to who is like acts as like Iana in this organization for things like which subnet gets What and what has you and now that is their root DNS for example stuff like that. That's on Joe's talk Okay, cool. I'll wait for that then. Yes, can you yeah? Automatically assigned 10 dot subnet Can you please put up the Platform matrix for a minute up there on the screen. I Can do that But let me get it over here where I can see it real quick. I should just mirror this hang on give me One moment, please You live in the Pasadena area Do you guys want us connecting to the Huntington Hospital node on 3-8 or are we kind of responsible to get our own? link over to Santiago and Then I know last year Some of these products have been deprecated. I know this was updated recently and there was some Questions about minimal development resources for redoing the firmware on some of these products Is there any recommendation for if you have no hardware now? And you live in Pasadena what might be a good idea at this time give the microphone to Joe he can answer I'll give the quick and dirty and then he can develop anything new you buy now will be fine So the issue is the older devices that are out there and available particularly as they come online on eBay or you know resale those are all 32 mega RAM devices and Open WRT and Arden The the the kernel itself and all you know the minimal plat packages to run the devices are pushing that 32 mega RAM Ceiling so there you know we start to see a little bit of issues as as there's not enough memory And particularly if people are installing additional packages like tunnel servers and mesh chat and other things We're getting to the point where you won't be able to install some of these packages on 32 meg because there just isn't enough Flash space for the storage and there's not not enough RAM space for to operate in all new devices You buy you're going to be and you need to ensure they are 64 meg of RAM minimum and 16 meg of flash minimum those those should be the criteria the minimum for any new devices you buy Otherwise you're at risk at you know it's you know just less stability over time as the as the kernel You know more and more features all the time get we want to load on there Just won't won't be a long term is what you'll get with the 64 meg and 16 flash device. Hey Joe in general Other than the bullet which older devices are 32 meg Quite quite a few of them on that list Some of them I believe like an error router the older models are 32 and the newer XW some models are 64 so so you really have to look at the very specific Model that you have to know but generally I think even a newer bullet XWs might be 64 so so It just depends on how old it is whether it whether it's still a 32 meg of a device or or not And don't buy anything. That's not Mimo like the bullets have a single coaxial. That's not Mimo So the greatest signal strength in the world, but it'll be half of what you could get through point Yes, all the micro ticks on the scroll down there are Are all 64 meg Ram The the model numbers are in there and in in the cells Most of those are hot links to to Amazon to the specific model That does give a little kickback to Arden ink if you click from there So we encourage everyone to or if you smile that Amazon.com you can configure it to donate to anyone I have mine configured to donate a few pennies for every purchase to Arden So yeah, good point. You know, we want the mesh nodes to be lean and mean for Their core role in life to be a mesh router part of the infrastructure When you run a service now on top of that network infrastructure, we don't want to start loading down The core infrastructure devices themselves in the hosting services It's starting. It's not their core function and there's plenty of opportunity and and you know raspberry pies and bigel boards and You know everything else out there to host services. So so just think of it that way You know the the core devices themselves that are the infrastructure let them do that Add on all the services as devices servers and raspberry pies and whatnot And let them do best what they do Yeah, that's because right now The the flash the the actual images are just barely fitting in an eight eight meg flash Which so some of these older ones are we're to the point where we're we're risking that we won't be able to install tunnel Packages on top of it because there won't be any flash space to store it on some of those older ones So but when you double that there so we've got quite a bit of headroom there for for growth for those Those devices we're going to try to keep the older devices working on the latest releases. So That we hope we can so your 64 and 16 flash devices will have a lot of a lot of extra room and in growth so Just to you know, we're still going to Q&A. I was just going to show this This is a live view of the map. This is Dan in our 60s site. I clicked on his it's a Manifestation m5xw one of the little ones He's pointing at Verdugo peak There's his latitude and longitude ssid channel bandwidth all the good stuff Down at the bottom the link is to Wd6cb y dash la dash verdugo dash west dash sector dash 5g and The etx both ways is one point one one, which is quite good at etx is expected transmission Count trans Yeah, it's a it's a it's a metric of how good the The path is the lower. It is the better. Yeah etx is how lsr measures the cost To term and routing so a perfect RF link has a cost of one if if there's packet loss It'll get you know one point one one point two start getting higher A network cables a point one cost So as it looks at all the costs from link to link it adds it up to find The shortest cost to get to the indestination to route it yeah kind of a rough rule of thumb for Moderate speed video and etx of four is probably all the higher you want to go I would say yeah, it's it's a little You have to interpret it very carefully because if you have a hundred perfect Cost or a hundred links that have no Loss in them. They're very high quality. You could have a cost of 100 and you'll have great It'll work great We I do from my home in Mishfee Ho all the way around to To Mekula it goes through Redlands hundred miles seven eight hops I can do a 20 30 minute millisecond ping time all through that network And do streaming video with no problem with the etx is you know eight to ten to twelve with with no problem It'll go higher it all depends on how quality of links you are it takes one bad link to yeah Throw a monkey wrench in and oh that reminds me anybody here in the packet packet radio Okay Back in the day with the 1200 Bod stuff the latency was so high you did everything you could to minimize the hop count You know you have beams and you know fifty sixty mile length It's the exact opposite from here. You want every link to be of high quality even if it's shorter It's kind of different head chains, but since you don't use packet anyway, never mind Oh one more thing I wanted to show here in this link information down here 13.26 miles away at a bearing of 85 degrees pretty nice Assuming they haven't lied about their lat lawn few people are creepy about that That's about all I have Why don't we break it up? We'll do individual Q&A Joe is over there raise your hand Joe Oliver's over there and David next to him is fairly competent with mesh networking to anybody else here been on mesh networking over a year or so Okay him back there. He's your go-to guy back there Okay, we're done. Thank you Oh Okay, so long as you have a garden somewhere, well, I'm going to call it 30. Okay, so I'm the CERC coordinator for Monty's Village. I'm building a one-and-a-day computer network. We've got the virtualized devices. They are going to be tested at people's homes. We've got the pretty healing quality. Yes. I'm now planning to come to your talk at 4.30. Is that going to give you a good background on what I need to do to get started? This is good. I'm going to go in, yes, to more of the technology and the microwave characteristics you have to be concerned about and the one-and-a-day open source side of it. So, do you know Gary Wong? I'm very familiar with him. Yeah, they just came up. Gary is part of a group called L.A. and he's been working with L.A. for five years now. He's had the best of his time with L.A. and he's been working with L.A. And there's another group over here. Where are you? North East L.A. South of the 134, East of the 5, North East L.A. So, yeah, so, right in here. So, like these guys, the L.A. and the L.A. and the L.A. and the L.A. and the L.A. So, who's that? L.A. people. Right. Really? That's Old Monnery Hill South Pass right by the one-and-a-day open source. Right by the chicane right here. So, I guess the thing is, you guys all have Old Monnery Hill? I live in Monnery Hill. So, I guess the issue is this area now has great coverage from five to three to nine coverage levels. So, you can all go up and down to you to use this area. But if you get a little hill, then you can make a little little small cell area. Yeah, I've actually got a small work unit that's going to go the top of Devon Park. That old owner, our air-conditioning unit. He said that you can use this area to the end of the route. Well, so you see these are five and they show up as five here. Yeah, so some people don't put their left hand on them. So there's tons of notes that are in there. And they're hard like together somewhere up on the hill. Yeah. And they, uh, yeah. What do you use for your tunnel? This is the VPN. Okay, it's the VPN. So you guys are implementing on your firmware as some of your own version of the STF. So, yeah, we don't see like the VPN or the STF, right? Those are other, I mean, they're technically quite massive. These are my favorite kind of protocols. We're using, uh, what else do we want to use? Static. That's often required. I keep hearing. We're doing this at Layer 2. We're doing, uh, you know, the mesh that is, you know, the layer is free router. Oh, okay. Although it's the whole thing, you know, we can't do a broadcast and just plug the network everywhere. You can just wire it all there. So broadcasts don't go through the mesh line. And they don't propagate through. It's the layer that's free router. And I'll go more into that. Seriously? Yeah, I'll go into that later too. So, uh, the OSR does basically, I'll go into that later too. Exchanges IP information. That's Rowdy talking. But, yeah, you might want to sync with, uh, with, with ORV for getting, where you're at, that's how you would get into the gray router. And it also can be, uh, a really boring program between stations that you have. In the absence of getting your own local cell coverage. Or if the speaker, um, So, to hit Matt Wilson, any of these, as long as they're a newer product that hasn't 64 years? Yeah. Yeah, like this is, this is not Mimo. It only has one, one antenna. So we don't recommend those anymore. But it's generally the go-to, um, for what you would need for five gigs. What, what people shouldn't go with is like a light head-grim on five gigs. Well, I think, well, three, so, here's, here's the deal. Three, three is five for, for the technology, the equipment available. Um, are pretty close. What happens is that when you get, when you buy a three gig dish or a five gig dish, they're physically the same dish. They're lowering costs, right? They're reusing that. But because, so, so five gigs have higher gain. But three gigs have less noise. So the higher gain up here is compared to less noise. And here, they kind of balance each other out. It's not a huge difference on what you're going to get. So the go-to you're saying, man, let's say for five gigs. Um, I would get like a power beam, you know, a power beam like a 300 or 400. You know, there's, there's, there's actually, there's a 300 and four, those are, you know, the 300 millimeters. So you got like, you got like that 400 and just the new ones. Um, you go on 16. I mean, yeah, a 300 would work for you. You know, you could pick it up and on to 400 if you want. I'd get stuff like that. These, um... Yeah, I have that one. Power beam at five. Yeah. And make, yeah, make sure you get the 802.11 in models like this. Don't get a model that's an AC model. That's a whole different driver. And it's not... So the hardware is different. That's right. You're going to find AC, specific AC models in earlier models. And how do you know? And make you go with the older ones. Generally, um, generally it'll have AC in the model name. Oh, okay. And you, so, so you don't, don't get those. Those aren't compatible. Um, it's, so it's either this and, you know, this, I would, I have like a 620 on, on a tower site. And, and you can get shielding around it. And so shielding that goes around it. So that helps you at a tower site. At home, I, you know, you could go with the most effective cost with the lightest, it's like $55. And then there's an XL, the bigger one that's like a 27 DBI. That's only $85. They're, they're very cost effective. How much is some of the stuff you should use to cost? It's kind of like the price of stuff that's like... It's, like, it can get lying on the floor. Yeah, they just keep going down. Well, the ubiquity, there's no support. You're form support only. So you're paying just for the hardware, that's how they kind of get cost there. Yeah, is it because, is it like dual-use hardware? And hardware is basically the same stuff that would be used in production for something else. You just re-purpose, right? Some of the OEM components I would get. Yeah, you know, these are, because they're so low cost, they're just throwaway devices anyway. Well, I'm saying that they're re-purpose, like somebody would be using it for regular production use for more else. But, or it used to be used for production use. People use it. I don't know, carriers would use it. Yeah. Oh, yeah, you will just see these things. They do make carriers great stuff. Yeah, this is considered carriers right here. You'll see these at other sites. It's the reason why the price is so restrictive. It's not being custom made just for ham radio use. It's actually being used for other things too. They're all made for Part 15 wireless. And it's a lot of competition. Competition tries to price it down. Yeah, that's a, because I remember that all the stuff used to be expensive because it was kind of like very niche market space, but now with so many companies jumping on board. The equity was really the first. It's really kind of, it's like Valkeneg on the Amazon side. Yeah, I've only heard Ubiquiti done because of their, they're coming down to like consumer-grade network hardware. I haven't even realized they made dishes and stuff like that. Yeah, they were like a couple years until they got into the home market. Yeah, that's how it first came around. There's this and, you know, Unify, they have their Unify with smart devices. You know, that's what kind of price they put them down. Yeah, that's where I'm hearing other stuff. Yeah, that's pretty close to a pretty equity rocket business. Yeah. So, I'd probably only do this at the house if I make miles away from Wilson. If I'm going to throw one of these in the back of this truck, I'd never be able to perform all these. Yeah, this is my carry-on. Get the six. You're saying it's better? Well, this is not easy to carry around this big. I've got a truck. I think the other, the other one, the other one, yeah. They're plastic backing, you know, hard plastic backing with a wire mesh in it. So they're very, very light compared to this. How do you mount one something like more mobile? Like put it on a tripod and then just pick it up? Yeah, you just, generally, people have little tripods with a telescope. Things go up and they need to have a, you know, a clamp on them in a couple years. So the 400s are plastic and the 620s are metals. No, no, no, no, I'm just going to, so the ubiquitous stuff is all metals. You know, the feeds are plastic, right? The dishes are metal. They stand. Yeah. Which one is that? That's the micro-tech and it's a low-degenerate. So it's got a plastic backing with a wire mesh. You know, it's a real hard plastic UV. How strong is that? That's the private. I put one inch PVC. I'm probably going to replace some of that heavier. But what in a quarter? Because it was a little... A little bit. It looks like a fan stand. Yeah, it looks like a fan. Los Angeles County Fairground Starplex Organization. And they, I can get access to a lot of the aged-out miraculously. I think that's a good idea. And tennis. Yeah. You can get this in 97 and then you can get this in the U.S. 97 and then you can get the router board. So I'm wondering, is there anything that can run? The router board can only be flashed. Those coracci. Well, yeah, there is. There is bad hardware and it doesn't have the right chip set in it for the open source that they were able to look. So this is, that's your wire going up the hill on the Hanford area. And then you plug in the router board and it's used to your... So the light head here is yellow. Is it just researching? Oh, it's in the nightly bill. Yeah, it works fine. People already have it on their phone. Okay. Yeah? It's going to do it on them. Put a web camera, whatever. Just use them along the hub device like you did. Okay, I got to run back and relieve on at the booth. Are you guys all local here? Yeah, which hill? So if you go to Prokosys.org, which is a ham group, they're going to be presenting in Palm Springs first weekend. First weekend of April. Okay. And it's a hands-on radio here in Playa de Manches. Yeah. But it's going to be oriented around art. Yeah. It's going to be petitioned. So... So I'll be out there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But... Where's the venue? It's going to be in Palm Springs Road. There's a veteran support. It's on the Palm Springs Road. Yeah. There's a lot of rock here. I have that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to... I can't see so the other one in my house because there's a dirt between me and there. So that's why I set up this like a portable. So... And I actually... Because all I had was a... An old TVS. Like what? A TVS? Uh, 1100 full amp. I plugged it in there. Oh, you're going to be able to run for three and a half hours. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What's cool is you can explain to me whether you can take him out of the place. You can create shit. You can stuff on fly, which is really rad, right? You can get out. Oh, I want to... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I bet you anything to do... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sure. So... Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, yeah. Just... Oh! Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh! A shirt. Yeah. in the Canale Valley, he has to plan this, you know all depends on resources, money and time, no, I'm retired now, I don't have the money, unfortunately a lot of the hand clubs are becoming a lot more conscious, hand clubs and E&M, first responders and stuff like that, we were all verbal communications going here, going out here, and now I'm here, this is our intent to be able to make it, in fact we're working with a group wanting to push out cameras for that, some groups are contracting, some of them are calling for other private contractors, but we've had to talk to them about sharing our video with them and they may supply cameras for our site, you know, kind of scratch my back type of thing, so as time goes on the coverage will have to be able to terminate your connection, authenticate, terminate, we're going to be coming out here, I've heard what you've heard, so I'm going to take a rest, like a number, now you're set up, we'll leave me alone, we'll end up on that network, and we're having voice companies using diapers or IPA, you know, so, E&M, master's to get, you know, over auto, it's a great time, it'll be kept there, as long as you get it, I could go and set it up, my numbers have a conversation, yeah, I think it's like, dude, they don't get it, it's the old dude, that bitch, the really loud ones are the ones that, they're the hard core conservatives, right, they don't want change, analog radio, that's it, and that's fine, I don't want you to come along with me, I'll take the technology, I'll help you, there's going to be a small intersection of the two, I think it has to do with, I really think it has to do with, you can zoom in on this double, so this is gate chicken right here, and we're going to see how far we can go with this, right, I have FPGA, blockchains, and Raspberry Pi, yeah, it's going to be, that's going to be like really technical, I'm going to go grab this, I'm going to go grab this, so it's kind of generic with some specifics, I mean, there's links and everything, and if anybody wants a copy of the piece of evidence, I'll send you, and I've embedded the link so that you can, or anybody can, because, you know, I didn't, I mean, I put in, three months ago, something was going to be a slumber, no, no, Friday, that was the old SOS, that was the old SOS, it got switched from CQD to SOS because CQD is a little bit harder to keep, the SOS is, I was originally planning on bringing a Pi to do the presentation with, then they told me there's no monitor, I mean, I could only hook up to one or the other, so that's why I brought this, and I, I've been a ham going on in the 30s, okay, how's that, five by five, great, anyways, I've been a ham going on 37 years, ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be a ham, but I didn't really get into it until I worked for the Navy as a civil servant, and I, I, as far as joined the ham club there, and back then, there was the various different levels of, as far as Morris Code, went through, went through with the ham club, and during my first, first, we got practice test, the VE said, you passed, here's your license, you know, go and send it in, and I was just doing practice with them, but times have changed, and a lot of digital things are actually, we are taking the place of where Morris used to be. Anybody know why the U.S. dropped the Morris Code requirement? Again, I teach, quiz is necessary. No, that's, that's not it. What's that? Yeah, nobody else but the United States kept Morris Code. In fact, the maritime services dropped Morris Code, so it's like, why keep it, is what the FCC said. Anyways, this is the stereotypical image that most people think of ham, right, and sort of looks like my office at home too, but I must have somewhere around 40 computers and almost about the same number of radios, ranging from DC to light. Yeah, what's that? For those who don't know what the Raspberry Pi is, it's essentially a single board computer, which was originated in the United Kingdom in order to teach what would be the equivalent of our junior, well actually, to teach from our equivalent of 8th grade through 10th grade students, as far as computer science. In the U.K., you finish high school at 16, and there is a national mandate that everybody must come out knowing something about computers because that's the future. You finish college there with a bachelor's degree at 21, and you started 18, and when you go for a degree, like say you did one in computer science, that's all you do for three years. My PhD is from the University of Durham in England, but all the other stuff I did here, and I was an eye-opener as far as the change between the two education systems, and it was quite different. Okay now, the Raspberry Pi Foundation make the official version, and from there, from them I found out that as of November 2016, they sold over 11 million, there's going to be a new version coming out, and then there's a bunch of people cloning it since it's open source. There's the banana pie, orange pie, cherry pie, apple pie, and it's just like the Arduino. Why was the Arduino invented? To who? Yeah, Italian grade schoolers. What's that? Okay now, for those who don't know what the pie is, I put down all of the specs. It does quite a lot, it's got numerous GPIO pins for general purpose input output, and it will as far as go to a TV with HDMI or to monitor with HDMI, it's got a primitive sound card, a Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The only thing it doesn't have is analog input other than the mic jack. They are cheap, meaning I would have loved when I was in school back in the dark age just to have a machine this powerful. When I started, we were limited to 32K of RAM, and all the tricks from back in the mid to late 70s are coming back because of these guys, because they have a limited amount of RAM, and limited meaning 512 megabytes. Okay now, there are numerous versions of operating systems that can run on it, even the windows will run on it, pardon me for saying the evil empire here, but there's all sorts of Linux versions that are run on. The official one that most people like to use is Raspium, and there's a version that you can download called Noob, which essentially is easy to install. Now, there are many things that you can do with each of the components to Pi. You can communicate in many forms. If you add on a very inexpensive, see they call it a hat, you can get a real time clock so that it will keep time when the Pi is turned off, when it boots it automatically goes to a time server and gets the correct time. With these, as far as the IO ports, you can control things. My sprinkler system is controlled by a Pi that talks to one of my Macs so that everything's scheduled. Controlling sprinklers was easy because with the GPIO, you can buy these relay boards. They're like $10 each on eBay and you plug in 8 and away you go. For those who've never seen a Pi, this is what it looks like out of the box. And as you can see, there's all sorts of stuff. There's USB, HDMI, and its disk is one of the micro SD cards. Now, for expanding the IO, you can, like I said, add a hat for timers. You can put on motor controls. In fact, one of the other talks from what I understand was about a rover. And from what I understand, they're also using a Pi as far as sensors that are attached as well as servos. You can do all sorts of things as far as graphics go and attaching a GPS. You can either buy theirs or just sling on a USB GPS and you're all set and ready to go. Now, you were saying about doing something here earlier, meaning as far as educating. Adafruit, which there's this lady in New York, she started a company solely to bring things for kids. And it's doing quite well and that's where you can get, or I get a lot of my parts. If you are going to do any sort of development, especially if you're going to turn a Pi into a repeater, you can develop a Python, a C++. Anybody know about the QT environment? The QT, which was originally developed by a company called Trolltech, which was in Norway, that's what KDE desktops developed and all of their libraries and everything are used for it. And because of the popularity of the Pi throughout Europe, it's kind of interesting as far as the story of Trolltech. They started out with QT. They were bought by Nokia so that Nokia could have a way of developing software for their phones. Microsoft bought Nokia because nobody was using Windows on phones. And then they sold off the QT to somebody else because it was competing with their own product. And now it's owned by Digia and there's an open source version which we use down at PCC for it to teach the students so that they know how to do as far as cross-platform development. You can develop on one and then have it make an image for an Android phone, a Raspberry Pi, or an iPhone or Mac and any version of Linux. And the open source version is great. It just doesn't include some things that you wouldn't really want to use unless you're a business. Now, let me go back. There's also other IDEs that are available. Adam is used quite a lot and it is geared, essentially, the whole Pi is geared towards the inventor and the maker. Okay, now, I haven't found a ham yet that doesn't love the Pi. Okay? I mean. So, one thing is, it's easy as anything to turn into a receiver. Anybody here interested in aircraft? If you are, you can buy a $25 Australian TV tuner, slap it into a Pi as far as USB, and then do a slight little tweak and then you can pick up all the aircraft frequencies as well as the little transponders on the plane. And that's kind of fun. Or you can tweak a little bit more and it goes very wide band, very, very wide band. You could use it on HF4 to receive as well as in the 440 band. Yeah, yeah. And it's absolutely, absolutely fantastic as far as its receiving capability. I modified one to run on one of my Macs just for fun just to see if it would work. Now, you can also turn it into a transceiver, again with another Australian or UK version. There's a little transmitter that you can get. And the only problem is it's not type accepted here in the US, but it's totally software-defined radio. And then there is one that they've been trying to market or trying to bring to market for a while that is a fully software-defined radio non-kit, meaning it's totally made. And it's based on a processor similar to the Pi. It's a DB4 MF, if I remember correctly. But that has, they've been saying since 2016 there will be next year, but it's totally software-defined. You can make a very, very cheap and reliable either a permanent or mobile repeater. The Pi doesn't take that much power at all. And you can actually run it off of USB, so I didn't haul in my portable repeater here, but one 12-volt battery, meaning a nice size, a 12-volt battery powers both the repeater and the Pi through a step down. And it will run for hours. Okay, now, the controller is essentially based off of Asterisk. I heard you saying that you were doing a phone system at home. Yeah, same here. I've been playing with Asterisk since the mid-2000s, and I have everything interconnected so I can dial my phone and turn on the lights. Yeah, read nerd, okay. And when my phone answers, it answers with this voice that says, let's see, please wait while I try to find somebody. That takes care of all the scam callers. They're gone. Now, the way that it works with Asterisk, there is this worldwide network called Allstar. Allstar interconnects a series of Asterisk-based repeaters, whether they're running on a Linux box, you can also run Linux on Mac. I mean, you can run Asterisk on Mac, and it interconnects everybody. Everybody who's on Allstar has a node number. That node number, essentially, you dial as far as DTMS, and then you're interconnected. So you could come in here in LA and go out in Sydney, or you could have a multi-way inter-conversation between Europe, Asia, and LA, all through the interconnections, which is very popular amongst people who do not want to upgrade, because you can talk worldwide without having all the expensive antennas and equipment. You could do it with an HT as long as you can connect to one of the Allstar nodes. One of the other very nice things is that since it's running on Asterisk, you can do all sorts of scripting for it to do certain things so that when you key in a certain sequence, it will go to a system that, say, for example, you've got your own weather station. It will read back all the telemetry for you, or you could key in something else and have it interconnect with the public telephone switch network, which is easy to do. It's ready to go as far as being a phone system when you install Asterisk. The only problem is it doesn't have the repeater part activated. Now, anybody in here not a ham? Okay, this slides for you. Basically, a repeater is a way for you to extend a communications system across a wider area. That's a very basic definition. It allows somebody with a low-power HT to communicate across either, for example, L.A. County, across the state, across the country, and with Asterisk worldwide. Some people say, well, why do you use a Pi instead of just buying a commercial repeater controller? Well, most people's wallets, if they're setting up one on their own, are not that deep. Okay? At the icon, a controller runs about $1,000 for the D-Star on eBay. So $1,000 versus a $25. What are you going to do? And the other thing is you can self-modify what you want your particular repeater to do instead of sticking with whatever icon or Kenwood or whoever says that this is all you can do. Now, in order to turn Asterisk into a repeater, there is a module called app-rpt that comes standard with Asterisk. The only thing is it is not automatically instantiated, so you have to tell Asterisk to load that when it boots. It was written in C. Now, why do you think they wrote it in C, speed? Actually, on my Pi, you very rarely hear a lag, very, very rarely. Now, it's extremely easy to set up, easy to frame of reference. So for some people, it takes five minutes, other people, it takes five days. It all depends on your skill. Number one, with the Linux command, number two, with Asterisk, and then number three, your patience level. But once you get it set up, you're set and ready to go. Now, in order to interface to a radio, there's some extra hardware that you need. And one thing that you can do is I get some sound cards that are cheap, as well as another device which I'm going to get to in a second. If you want to get a pre-packaged version, there's an item called RAST PBX. And RAST PBX comes pre-installed with everything ready to go. And for those who want a copy of the presentation, and the reason I put all the links in is if you just email me, I'll email you a copy of the presentation so you can click on the link. The advantage of RAST PBX is somebody's gone through all the trouble as far as making it essentially load and go. Whereas if you are going to use it on your system, they're going to have to then download Asterisk, go through the whole setup. This is all set and ready to go. It is an ISO. And it's extremely easy to, as far as take the ISO and then copy it onto, and then you're set and go. The nice thing about RAST PBX is that there's updates that are available. Though it does have a web-based scene management tool which requires sort of separate updating, but that's very easy to do. Once a week, you just go to the administrator portal, click a check for updates, and then install the particular updates. Phone number, or multiple. I've got phone numbers in nine different countries and 20 different cities, so I can talk to my friends. Yeah, I've got one in Belfast, one in London, one in Tokyo, so that my friends don't have to spend any money to call me. We all chip in just to pay the fee for the number and then they all appear as either a node for those that have good IP. And for those that want to dial, like they're on their cell phone, they can dial a phone number, say for example in Tokyo, and then talk back here for free and then do outgoing calls too. What's that? Yes, it does, which we do use. It's kind of fun scheduling somebody in Tokyo, somebody in London, and me having a three-way conversation. Right, normally me. Yeah, now there's a lot of things that have been added in for safety because in today's world you don't trust anybody. So a fail to ban is automatically installed. It also includes a GSM for doing the voiceover IP, which is very clear and very small and bandwidth as compared to the other ones that are available. It does automatic backups, and for those who want to send faxes, it has a built-in fax gateway. And there's a link that I have included there for the instructions on how to set things up. Now, in order to connect to the radio, you're going to need a USB sound card dongle. They're cheap. Amazon has them as low as like $7.95. The only thing that you have to make sure is that it has the right chip on it, and I have the link here for you so that you can make sure the one that you're going to buy has the correct chip. But in order to do the modifications, you're going to need a steady soldering hand and better eyes than mine because it's tough. You have to, as far as crack the case, and then interconnect a series of wires to certain points, and then it will give you access to what you need then to connect to your radio, which then you need the schematics for your radio in order to, and if you're fortunate enough to have a radio that, like, for example, the Motorola's have access directly in the back so that they can be turned into a repeater, you can access what you need back there, or you're going to have to do it through the microphone, or you're going to have to clue something. But if you don't want to deal with all of that and you have some extra money, and this is what I'm saying by the soldering, but if you have some extra money, you can buy one of these from a company called DMK Engineering. They give hams a break on price. You have to give them a copy of your license, and I'm not plugging them. I'm just stating the fact. But that is the sound card with everything soldered for you. And on, you know, one side is, one side is a DB-25, and they've got all the pinups on their, we've got labels, so you can then just make a DB-25 and then start pulling things out, and then you just connect it with USB and you're set and ready to go. That's what I do. And then, because my eyes aren't what they used to be, I just had both of them replaced. On $95, you had hammering. Is that pariah? Huh? Is that pariah? No, no. Now, pariah was way too much. Right now, I am using, well, actually I've got two setups. One, I am using two of balfangs, you know, the little cheapy things. And then the other one is a two of the commercial yeesoo that have been as far as modified so that they will work within the handband. And the balfangs is just for it to throw something together, take it to the field, and go for it. Now, there's this company, for those of us who can't see that well anymore, that makes the cables for you. Depending upon the radios that you want to hook up, which you have to, as far as tell them what are the radios, what's going to be the receiver, what's going to be the transmitter, they will make the cable for you. And depending upon the radio, it depends upon the cost of the cable, and they make them individually. Except for the most common ones. And, let's see, I paid 125 for one of my cables for it to interconnect. In order to get into the worldwide, as far as being able to talk worldwide, one thing you can do is the All Star Network. You have to register, and in the registering you have to provide a copy of your license. And then they will give you a node number. That node number is how you are identified as far as your repeater or your base station to the rest of the world. These are my two node numbers. This is the two balfangs, that's the two commercial radios. And so, as long as you have internet, you can dial in these when they're up on the air and then come out from anywhere in the world. There is no fee for this, it's all run by volunteers. If you skimish about messing with the Linus command line, which I hopefully doubt in here, and you don't want to mess with asterisk, All Star actually has several, as far as images that you can download with everything set and ready to go. And again, they are free. It took me less than half an hour to set up with this, and most of that was download time. If you are going to go on to the All Star network, there are various different types of nodes, and you have to identify what you're going to be, whether you're going to be a repeater, whether you're going to be a base station, a simplex node, and then you're all set. If you want to be a hub, you have to prove that you have a huge pipe, as far as being able to route other people through you. And there's generally, actually, the hubs do not have any radios at all, as far as connecting them. They're just for routing. But one pine can control multiple repeaters, as long as you're not going to over tax the poor little thing. OK, DTMF is required. In fact, Astrid, right out of the box, is able to handle the DTMF. But if you are going to attach to All Star, there are certain things that you have to have installed so that anybody in the world dials something, that means that your repeater is going to respond in a certain way. So, like, if you want to interconnect with somebody else, a way you go on mine, I have Star 9 bring me up onto the public switch telephone network, and then I dial out, and just for fun, I have it scramble the caller ID, which is easy. OK, now, you can control your repeater from anywhere in the world, as long as you can get to another All Star node, you can shut it down, you can have it do whatever you want, or you can have it read back as far as various different sorts of information, such as current temperature, if you have a temperature sensor attached to the pie, or you can have it read back the current time, whatever information you want. But if you are going to go on, you are going to need to read this because that lists all the mandated things that your node must be able to handle. And to be honest with you, I forget all of them because it's about that long. Oh, just as a side note, why is a phone number in the United States 3, 3, 4? Area code, a prefix, and 4. Yeah, but why? Yes, back when I was a kid, Eagle Rock was Clinton, C.L. But there's a reason why it's that. And there's a paper that was written by an AT&T psychologist in the 50s called The Magic Number 7, a plus or minus 2. And that was what was used in order to create the phone number. Software developers have not read that paper generally because if you begin to think of everything on a wind-doing system, how many things are across the top? More than seven. How many things are per each one? More than seven. So it gets very hard to remember things. So AT&T decided on the 3, 3, 4, because that way you are remembering three groups, one of 3, one of 3, one of 4. And it makes it much, much easier for as far as people to remember that way. Now, the problem is these codes, since the list is so long, very hard to remember. What's that? Yeah, I'm going to update when I send this out. Now, since it is running asterisk, you can do all sorts of macros such that if you, as far as key-in a certain sequence, you can leave, you can as far as leave voicemails for other hands, you can do outgoing calls, you can receive incoming calls, you could, to your heart's content, do all sorts of things. Now, the All Star Network has been adopted by numerous hand groups that are into emergency services because it's cheap, it's portable, and it's very easy to set up as far as the power requirements. I actually repeat dispatch console, it's free software, and what do you call it? You can mount a pie in your vehicle with what do you call it? A USB, a charger, attach it to your radios, and then you've got a mobile repeater. Now, the nice thing is, if you accidentally blow it up, it's cheap, and all that means is no Starbucks for two days, and you can buy a new pie. Now, if you want, you can record. There's a legal issue with that, but you could have the pie record all of the conversations that go through both the phone as well as the repeater. Now, to establish the node, like I was saying, you're going to have to have a tech licensor above, a pie, the asterisk ready to go, your registration done, what radios you're going to connect, and the minimum cost would be about 200 bucks for throwing something together with, as far as making the cable yourself. And I'm sorry, I said that it was 95, I'm sorry, that's the commercial rated, we got 65 is what I paid for mine for the hands, none. They just give hands a discount, because from what I understand, the company was founded by two hands. If you're really into the pie, there's numerous other, as far as projects that you can get into for the pie, dealing with amateur radio and just, well, like the top one. That was developed for we call high school kids to become ham, and to get them used to dealing with a pie. Okay, now, if you are interested, there's my email, both work and a personal, and if you email me, I will send you a copy of the presentation, so that you can just click on the links, and I will fix that broken link, which I'm sorry about. No, that was my first call sign. KB6. Yeah, oh I mean here, it is KB6, LLB. That was my first call sign, and how do I say this? It just stuck when I started making email addresses and everything, and when I upgraded to an extra, I changed my call sign to KB6. But I didn't go back and change all my email addresses. You can use Zoie Burr on my cell phone, or on my iPod, or whatever, and just use that and connect. And you have to do a little ad that you hear in the password. So, and then you press and hold the Zoie Burr button, and you talk, and you come out wherever your room is connected to. You can do it without radios on it for the price of a pie. Correct. And what do you call this? Other, there are other soft phones that will work also, and actually any soft phone will work with it. It's not SIP, it's IAX protocol, so you have to use Zoie Burr, you have to use something that runs IAX. Vanilla Android phones have SIP plans built right now. Right, but you would have to install a SIP onto, or actually you would have to activate SIP, because as far as the repeater goes, it's doing everything IAX for it to guarantee, as far as the transmission quality. Apply it to get into your node from anywhere. Yep, which is great. Actually, in many ways you don't even need a radio anymore. Whoops, sorry. You have the option. That is true. And then, for those who are unfortunate to have a provider that changes your IP every time you reboot the modem, you can go to dynamicdns.com and they will give you free domain names. And so, you can then, every time that it reboots, your system has to, as far as notify, Hey, here's my new external IP and it updates all of the DNS tables. There's another one too, Dynew, D-Y-N-U. Correct. Do you do the same thing? I use that for my network at home too. And... Oh, I know. But I've been using, as far as D-Y-N-D-N-S for over 10 years. I know. But we got better than... Now, there was an experiment going on. Actually, we got digital ocean. Have you heard of them? Yeah. Yeah. There was an experiment going on by one of the local handclubs where they were, as far as loading everything onto one of the images and then having a pie locally, as far as connect to that one as an extension. And then, the one on digital ocean was actually those. So then the bandwidth was far better than as far as what they were able to get off of their carrier. That's an Amazon company. There are so many things out there it's hard to keep track of. One... Let's see, how do I say this? Back in the dark ages, when I was an undergrad, I started out wanting to be a medical doctor. But I got bit by the computer bug and switched and it changed the M to a pH. No, they don't. But my friends that went on to be MDs, I keep joking with them saying, you guys are still using textbooks from the 1890s. Gray's Anatomy. It doesn't change a whole lot. Yeah, it doesn't change a lot. Everything that I learned on in the Smithsonian. I mean, textbooks nowadays are dead within two to three years because of the fast pace that everything's going through. Any other questions that anybody has or comments? Sorry, I have not attempted that. And I'm trying to remember if I know somebody who has, but I have not. One thing that I did not mention is for those that are getting into DMR, setting up a DMR repeater, all you need is the proper connections. And the TYT, they will give you the wiring for the mic. So you just take two 8-pin RJ45s and then cut them and wire it to the DMK engineering device and you're up and going. That's my next little fun project. There are people who have HF gear attached so that you can, actually there's one in London, that you can go from any node into London and then go out on HF. But you have to have the proper license in order to go out on the HF. And if you're really nerdy like me, you can dial things on the DTMS and have the garage door open when you're coming home. You know, turn on the lights, feed the dog. Oh, yeah. I mean, I've got everything. In fact, one of my dogs, she will not walk down a dark hallway. And one day I'm sitting there watching her and she's going back and forth, back and forth. She's a little thing only about that tall. She's going back and forth, back and forth. And then when the light comes on, she goes. It's like, yeah. You can do wonders. Any other comments, suggestions, complaints, bribes? Kind of pre-baked ISO that makes it all super easy. It's a pretty serious quad gun that you could turn your machine into. Like all those scams calls you get, that's all people that install easy ISO after this box is and didn't know how to configure them right and turn their phone system into a relay for Google with things for your business and IRS scams and all that crap. So just be careful and if you don't really feel like you know what you're doing, probably don't hook up to the phone network at first. I probably shouldn't say this, but the way I finally got an ex-girlfriend to keep calling me was I took her phone number and when her phone number came in, I generated a random phone number somewhere. And sent her calling, who knows where, since we're free. And that's the way she finally stopped calling because it was much easier to do that than to change my phone number. That took me all five minutes to engineer. The LA Sheriff's Department, so when they're going to go and kick in somebody's door, they call first on a little VOIP server that I made for them and it comes back saying like on the caller ID prize, okay? And so people will answer that thinking that they've won the prize, right? So then the Sheriff knows they're home, then guess what? Yeah, they go visit. Oh, I know, but yeah. Yeah, thank you very much. If there is any further questions, I'll hang around and if you email me, I will send you a copy of the presentation. Thanks for coming in. Okay, my name's Lars, I'm Lars, KJ-16E, if you ever do any HRF. Did you make the RF7? I do. Okay, you'll see, I usually want to do it directly on my bike, because you're the only guy that's still in the pipeline. KJ-16E, maybe. There you go. Yeah, you know, I've struck up a little, a little radio that took me to my bow bank and then connected to my phone. So yeah, so I used that when I'm out on my bike, so it reheaters that reliably, but I'm like, I'm a good partner, so yeah. Yeah, man. You're a good partner. You're a good partner, so yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm a good partner. Yeah, I'm a good partner. You're a good partner, so yeah. There you go. There's... I got these two all the way to the back. There'll be... There'll be two of them. Mine... I've got... I have the one for... either repeater plus... Just a part of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's my name right now. I mean, I started out with... No. Yeah. Yeah. I'm Dan. But he's like, well, thank you. That's actually, if you look at my screen stuff. He said he, uh... Pretty good. How about you? I've seen you in a while. I'm vertical. I sure hope so. I mean, it's not like you... No. I'm not an android. Now, I mean, I've been... ...talking to you as a career PR over here. Stick it in there. Don't even think of this for me. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so that's why I'm pouring. And then, uh... You know, I thought I'd be in need of a category. From join? Yes, I did. Yeah, I am. Yeah, therefore... I mean, therefore, I'm starting to line first. No, it is, um... It is a one-year position as... ...as an instinctive-spinning professor. And, um... ...what do you call it? I think you already have that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean... ...the appearances that I had... Yeah. You know, one of them, you had to have a clearance to know what I had. Yeah. But, uh... That's why I'm sure I'm going to go there. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I'll be there for a year, and I think I'll join. I'm just the only... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he's a good... ...uh, I don't know who it was. Yeah. Yeah. Like... Yeah. Right. Actually, the island that I was on is technically... I'm a TCC, so... ...the Air Force Academy. You know, that's in Colorado Springs. Oh, okay. Please do, please do. Stay here. Um... ...a computer science... ...my title is going to be that. I'll be there for a year. It just works. The next thing is to put a Wi-Fi on it. That's more than dual-compatible. Yeah. So, on the back... ...the way they work... Okay. Okay. By one foot, it's a $7... Which one? Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Okay. That's faster. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. And then I can say a little bit more about the construction. And then I figured I'll leave the one side of the block. And the top will drive about 3 millimeters longer if they look half one. Weird optically, the bottom would be a little longer than the bottom. So why do you guys not require there's a movement that they're going to start up here? You can sell that. And then it would be Amazon and Amazon. The Collin Vance and the old servos are like the door to the door, and the grime themselves to the depth. And the other thing that we do is take all the hard-duster hairpins, part of our feet, and we'll start a longer tail. I like that. You can get some of the hard-duster hairpins. I can take them all out of here and replace the half notch. And both of them will be there and out there for three months. That's because it's run all the time already. We'll put them all together. There are lots of them in here. All the way down to the bottom. I don't know if you guys want to get all the way out of here. Why are we out of here? OK. Walk a little bit. Right here. Take a seat. OK. And I don't want to make noise. You can lay back here. It'll be a big deal. It'll be a big deal. It'll be a big deal. It'll be a big deal. We're getting into the weather a little bit more than this. We've got a good way to fly out. We've got a good way to get to the приop and have it. We've got a good way to fly it. We've got a good way to fly it. Oh, you want to put our credit card in? You want to put your credit card in? No. Oh yeah. We're going to charge you. That's crazy. That's crazy. It's coming out of here. It's behind your head. One, two, three. Can anyone hear me? Okay, good. So we started yet. So let's start at three. I think I got like three minutes. But I was just playing here. This is something I'm going to be talking about on the speech. By the way, I'm Ben, A.I. 6 Y.R. And this is... If anyone has ever played with an iPhone or something, probably not in this crowd. Everyone's Android, right? Anyway, you can figure out what planes are overhead. Everyone goes, oh, cool. Apple's doing that. No, that's mostly Ham radio guys. And this is ADS-B exchanged on one of the websites that you can run. And it'll show you every airplane overhead, including some stuff that people don't want to know is overhead. And you can, for example... And this is real time, so we can tell that there's somebody in a private plane right here over San Reno. And you can track in real time and you can see what the flight path is. And it's pretty cool. I'll show you how it's useful in a little bit. But let's see if we see anything over... You can even track Air Force One on here with some... Not exactly, exactly. The U.S. Marine Corps wants to... KC-130 out over the... Out over the desert. There's also unidentified traffic as well. I'll talk more about it. Oh, here's one. This is an interesting one. Oh, that's the Air Force one as well. During the Thomas fires, there was a U-2 spy plane that went over. Taking pictures owned by NASA. Yeah, NASA owns the last one, I think. Yeah. Well, if you look at what the fire guys fly, they've got stuff that's way old. So this site, this is off of... This is an aggregation site because our own web page we have... I don't think it's up, but let me give that a try again, see if I can get it. I have to reboot that. Yes. Okay, well, it looks like it's about 3 o'clock, so I'll start here. Anyway, I'm Ben Quo, A.I. 6 Y.R. And what I'm talking about today is using Linux, Raspberry Pi, RTL, SDR, LAME, and other open source tools. And how you, as probably most of folks here pretty technical, can help in responding to natural disasters. And everyone goes, what does open source have to do with... And Raspberry Pi has to do with natural disasters. It's actually very interesting. There's a lot of stuff kind of an intersection between the cool technology that you play with and what's actually useful in the real world. And originally, all the stuff that I was doing here was for fun with a few other folks, Horvus in the back, W6BI, and Paul Strauss, WD6EBY. We were just playing along a little with these tools. And what happened is we had a few disasters roll along and they ended up being useful. So one thing that I figured out is that there's not too many people, and I suspect most of the people in here are more technical than others, but out there in the world there's a lot of people who would love to see this stuff out there but don't know how to implement it. So this presentation's maybe an introduction to this stuff, so maybe you can help out your local community and maybe help others who could find it useful. And anyway, so natural disasters. One thing I do want to note is hand radio operators and how many people who actually have a license? And who does not? Okay, great. Nice mix. So amateur radio has had a long history where public service, public safety has been involved ever since the beginning. I don't know if anyone's seen the old 1920s, 30s magazines where the hand radio operator saves the day. And obviously there's ACS areas and a lot of emergency communications nowadays. And that's still the case. And so I have had a few personal experiences where all this stuff we're doing for fun in amateur radio and as someone with a technical background has proven to be useful for a lot of people. And I think that's great when what you do, rather than just you playing with the project, ends up being something that a lot of people find useful. So examples, hurricanes. I spoke last year and you can look it up, but it ends up a lot of amateur radio was used after Hurricane Maria. It's the only way to talk to a lot of places including Puerto Rico and Dominica after the hurricanes. Wildfires, and that's what I'm going to talk a little bit about here. The technology that we've built in Ventura County, it was actually used for dealing with the Thomas fire, figuring out what was going on with the Thomas fire and helping the public know. And also this year with actually a lot of other fires including the big one with the Woolsey fire and the smaller Hill fire up in our area. The mudflide after in Santa Barbara, the Montecito mudflow actually used a lot of the same technology. And then there's a lot of other things that you see all the time, right? Flooding earthquake. So the biggest thing is all this technology open source is useful. And anyone know where this came from? Probably back in the PC days, the DOS days actually. So how can this be a key part of a disaster? So what I have is a system here, which I brought one in case you want to look at it, which is pretty simple. It's a Raspberry Pi and I think you guys, if you were in the last session, anyone here in the Linux world knows what Raspberry Pi is. And we have, this is a dollar pie pan from Dollar Tree. And then this is what is called an RTL-SDR card. And I think the last speaker may have mentioned that. And we'll talk a little bit about how those can be useful. By the way, if you ever want a toy that just does everything, these RTL-SDR cards, there are so many things you can do with these things. It's amazing what projects you can do. I saw one where somebody was using this to figure out what his neighbor's garage door code was and would play it back just to open the door at random. Anyway. So these things are great. So this, believe it or not, this is a really simple setup. And you can probably put one together for $55, $65, $75. And it can do so much. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about that. So I think most people are aware of what happened in Paradise, California this year. There was, this is the number one deadliest California wildfire in modern history. It's actually probably the deadliest wildfire in the United States. 85 people died, 153, 336 acres were burnt and 18,804 structures were destroyed. It was, and I don't have any of the videos here, but if you have a look at the videos and you want to know what happens when a city is destroyed by fire, that's what it is. And so back to this, we actually, what we're talking about is useful in responding to this kind of thing, especially in California where we have a lot of fires and it seems like things are getting worse. There's a lot of technology here related to Linux, Raspberry Pi, open source, which is really needed. So this, I'm going to play an audio file here. And this was recorded off of a remote scanner at the time of the fire. And I was actually listening, a lot of people were listening to this and I don't play that and then we'll show that video. This was, I think, about 30 to 40 minutes into the start of the fire. It was already 300 acres and it was spreading. There's a group of people out on the Internet who listen to these scanners just for fun to figure out what's going on. Sometimes it's people in their local neighborhood. Sometimes it is, there's actually people who do this who just enjoy seeing what's going on. And let me, next one here. So that's the kind of things that you can get from remote scanners and there's a site called Broadcastify which is very popular and what they do is you can go and go to any neighborhood, anywhere in the world and if there's a remote scanner, you can figure out what's going on. It turns out that this setup is the perfect setup for remote scanners and a lot of them are based on Raspberry Pi. Some of them have an actual radio attached but you can use these SDR cards because they are cheap and easy to use. So why is that important? So this was during the campfire and this is some of the information that's coming out because of the remote scanners and also because of the other thing we're going to talk about is you can use this to figure out what's going on with aircraft. I was showing that earlier but you can figure out what's going on real time with aircraft using one of these and it's something you can't get off a commercial website. So you can figure out, for example, where fire planes are. I'll show you a little bit more of that but this is Dave Chussain is a retired fire captain who's retired and what he does nowadays for fun is he sees what's going on and if it's a fire in California, he says, oh, I'll provide some information. So he's listening to the scanners and these are probably really small for the people in the back but he actually figured out where the fire was and was letting people know. There's clips of, so in the area of Paradise, California, when this fire is going on how much do you think the local radio stations were telling people to get out? You're in trouble. Nothing. They were playing Rush Limbaugh and people's houses were burning and so what do you think happened if you called 911? There was no help. We're on fire. It was swamped and also the 911 center got evacuated because it eventually burnt over so there's no help. So if you happen to have known that there was a fire and you look it up, there's a lot of folks who were putting out information. That information was faster than any news station. It's faster than any online news site. That information was real time. People were lying on it. I know that Dave, who I talked to a lot, he's gotten a lot of people said, you know what, if I hadn't been following you, we would have been dead because the early warning and it takes hours for the news media to figure out what's going on. My day job is the news media and it takes a long time to figure out what's going on and this kind of stuff here, this is 150 civilians are on foot trapped and protected by a couple of engines at Skyway and Wagstaff Road. That's the clip you heard and that's the picture you saw. That is what happened and that kind of information can save lives. This is not the only fire and the only disaster where that kind of information is useful. This is just one example. So I mentioned flight tracking. Flight tracking is a big piece of it. When there's a fire in California, they send in planes and you can't see these but this is kind of a generalized area is you can actually tell where those big tankers are dropping retarded and you can't go to any website that's commercial to find that. You need to have somebody who's put up one of these receivers and made that information public. It's all open source information, all crowdsourced information. Probably 99% of these are from either people who are Ham radio enthusiasts who just love doing it for fun or folks who just love putting stuff together like all the Linux folks in here and pilots as well, some pilots. These are some more technical ones. Here's an example from the Thomas fire up in Ventura. This is the kind of stuff you could get. I figured this out two years ago that if you followed the right planes you could actually figure out where the fire was. This one over here, you see this little outline? There was a certain plane at the end of the day would fly the perimeter of the fire. That's how they figure out where's the fire and they don't give that generally to the public but if you happen to have one of these great Raspberry Pi ADSB receivers you can actually see that information. The nice thing is you share that out on social media and all of a sudden hundreds of thousands of people have that information rather than I love it during the fire there. You go on the news station at the same house burning the whole day and the information is there's a big fire. There's a big fire. It's like where is it? What's going on? You can't figure that out unless you're listening to the radio scanners and if you're being able to look at the flight path you can even see what's going on. Let's see here. You can't see this too well with the lighting but you could actually see which house they were dropping water on with the helicopters too. It's a lot of information that you can gain from this kind of information. Here's the two technologies. Remote internet connected scanners and ADSB aircraft tracking. That's the two big technologies that enable all this in emergencies and this is also just even local fire police stuff and the beauty of that is both of those can be enabled by the same platform and that platform is what I'm going to talk about a little bit here. I'm not going to go into too much detail. I'm going to show you the components. I figure that there's a lot of walkthroughs and tutorials but at least you have an idea of how to set it up and you can maybe explore and play with it yourself. Really the two main pieces are a Raspberry Pi and I'll show a picture of that. I think you've probably seen that. This SDR card, there's a lot of variants of these. This is a small little thing. Let's talk about that a little bit. How does an internet scanner work? First of all, the scanner part of it. Anyone who's amateur radio knows you can have your own handheld and listen to things. There's a great thing that you can do as an amateur radio operator or even just anyone who enjoys this kind of stuff is you can make the same things that you can hear locally available to anybody in the world. That means that it's not just you but anyone in the world can listen in on whatever frequency you like. We have our local repeater up there. I don't think we got a thousand people up there but if you put a public safety channel up there sometimes that's the only information people can get. In addition, even people locally use this. Most people, unlike you and I who might have a handheld, all they have is their phone. You can download all these apps that call them scanner apps and all they do is pipe all this information that we are providing for free and charging for. They're piping that to their phone. How this works is I have a picture here. This is a public safety broadcast tower of some sort. All the radio, all the fire, police, any agencies really suffer the ones that encrypt it, which I can talk about later. You can do two things. One is you can get an expensive scanner. That's a handheld scanner from a unit in which costs $400. This is an audio card and put that on a Raspberry Pi and you pipe it in. I'll talk more about this part. Or you can use one of these cards which, again, you can pay less than $20 for and pipe it into your Raspberry Pi. From there, you just encode the audio and you stream it. You can stream it to BroadcastPi. You can also stream it to your own personal server if you want it. You could also make this into your own personal scanner and just put a speaker on it. All of a sudden you have, or just play it through the audio. There's a lot of things you can do. I mentioned here that BroadcastPi is a big company that lets people do this for free and that goes to your phone or to your tablet or to a PC anywhere in the world. That's kind of the whole setup of how internet scanners work. If you ever want to know what's going on in an area and you don't have a radio, you can always do that. Yes, I'll go into that as well. There are a lot. The interesting thing about a lot of this is these RTL-SDR cards, and I'll talk more about that, but they were developed for digital television in Europe. They are not meant for SDR, and somebody, I should go look up the guy's name, figured out that you can hack them and use them for anything you want. So here's ADS-B. This is the other big technology that's useful here. And how this works, any pilots in here? A few? Okay, not too many actually. So ADS-B is a new protocol, which has been adopted worldwide. And what that does is it puts these little... This is one of the kinds that... It puts a transponder in the plane. Rather than the old days when there's a radar and they're tracking things, there's actually a transponder that has the latitude and longitude and your airspeed and your elevation, all that stuff goes. And it's broadcast out. And it's broadcast out on 1090 megahertz. Yeah, it's 1090 megahertz, right? And it goes to these fancy, fancy receivers that are at airports, and it can go to anyone else, including us. And anything within sites, anyone who's familiar with RF is a pretty high-frequency signal. So it's mostly line-of-sight, but anything in the sky that you can see, you can probably receive. So using a bunch of open-source software again, which I love, on your Raspberry Pi, you can look at that locally. There's a software called Dump 1090, and you can watch all the planes coming over your house. You can pipe it to FlightAware. Anyone ever use FlightAware for figuring out when their flights are coming and going. So here's the bonus. If you set one of these up, and this costs you nothing to set up at home, and you feed that information to FlightAware. They give you a free commercial account, which is normally $400 a month. So if you do a lot of travel, and you want to put up a Raspberry Pi, you can even put this on your PC, too, but I would say Raspberry Pi is the best. And you can get a free account from these guys, and you can get all the travel information and all that. FlightRadar24 is another site that I like. Same thing. And VirtualRadar is the software that you can load, which is better than the Dump 1090. I'll talk a little bit about those. I do want to show the... I did bring up one of the others. This is ADSB exchange, which is piping all the flights, and our receiver is feeding to this, and this is all the flights over LA right now, for example. This one's a fire plane, actually. LA City Fire Department. And it disappeared, but it's probably below a hill. They probably just landed is probably what it is. Anyway, so you can actually... and the funny thing is you can even go in, and I'll zoom in here so hopefully people can see it. You can go to an airport, and you can see everyone that's parked at the gate. Right? Yep. Yeah, and you can see the ground vehicle to LAX, too, if you ever really care where your luggage is. So this is very powerful for... Well, it's just cool sometimes, but it's also very powerful to figure out where things are during a disaster. So that is ADSB. So I don't know how much... Everyone here know what Raspberry Pi is? Not everyone? Okay, a few people aren't real familiar. So basically Raspberry Pi is a computer, which is basically a Linux box, crammed into the tiniest little spot. This is not the smallest one you can get, but it gives you an idea. This is one in a case, and it does anything you think a PC would do. In fact, you can put a monitor on these, and you can play computer games on it. You can put a keyboard and mouse, and it can be your desktop. You can not use a normal desktop, and you can use the Raspberry Pi. If you're a hardware hacking kind of person or you want to put sensors in, there's a whole bank of pins where you can connect anything you want. So I think the last speaker mentioned, hey, you want to activate your garage door. You can put something on there where it will turn on a signal, turn off a signal to open your garage door. You can put a temperature sensor on there. You can put humidity sensors. You can put wind speed sensors. You can do anything you want. You can blink lights even. There's a lot of stuff there. There's a SD card for loading your software. There's a camera port for camera. So they're very powerful and very cheap. So that's Raspberry Pi. Most people know what that is. For what we're doing here, I actually recommend using the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. That is the last version of the Raspberry Pi. The next version of the Raspberry Pi is a lot more powerful, but it generates heat like no tomorrow, and it requires a lot of power. So when you're talking about something that's going to have running in the background that is going to be doing something, just feeding something to the internet, you don't need the fastest, the most powerful Raspberry Pi. You can get away with the Raspberry Pi 2 even, but the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is probably a good compromise. I mentioned here less power usage, less heat issues. So if you're not including the case, and the power supply is $35 for one of these, it's like nothing, right? Don't buy your coffee for two days. There's three days, whatever it is, and you can buy one. And if you want one with case and power supply, it's $55. So these things are no-brainer. If you like playing with any kind of technology, no-brainer, anyone here at Linux, it runs whatever variety of Linux you want. Okay, let's see here. So RTLSDR, I mentioned this card here. This is a different version. There's a billion versions of these. And essentially what they are is, I mentioned they are a digital TV card. And let's see if I can put that on the slide here. It's the most common versions of RTL 2832U R820. There's an earlier version called the E2000T. It doesn't really matter which version you get. It's just whatever is cheap. The general frequency range is 24 MHz to 1850 MHz. So it's a very wide range of signals they can receive. You can receive a lot of different things. I actually have one of these on a weather station in my backyard, which is receiving the signal for the weather station. And instead of me paying whatever the $50, $60 thing they wanted to receive the sensor and put it on the Internet, I just do it. I just use one of these. And that one's actually one with like three or four things running on the Raspberry Pi 2. The caveat is not all of these are capable of the full range of frequencies. I haven't figured out yet what the issue is except for every manufacturer in China they put in the same black or blue box but whatever's inside is whatever their design is. You know, if anyone's bought stuff off eBay your mileage varies. If you want some good, well-known versions which are a little bit more expensive but here in the U.S. Newelliq is the company and RTL-SDR.com they both have pretty good cards. They're pretty more expensive but you know what you're getting. If you're not applicable here for the disaster stuff but if you're interested in HF and listening to what's going on HF there's upconverters available. So you can actually plug upconverter which makes it so it can go lower than 24 megahertz and all of a sudden you can listen to any band, any ham radio band. So they're pretty cool. I said eBay is the $8 option and U.S. is $30. So what I've been doing is I've been buying two different ones off of eBay from different sellers that look different and hoping that what I've got is going to work. Yeah, so the comment I'm doing that's just for the people who are going to eventually watch this on video is they're more expensive ones do tend to have better frequency stability and do tend to behave a little bit better and I do agree with you on that one. Yeah, they do need to be calibrated and there's a whole thing, I'm not going to go through that but there's a lot of tutorials on how to calibrate those cards but they're a lot of fun. I mentioned some other stuff I've seen people do is you can build your own, you can build your own repeater, a receiver on this. We've got one on our WD6 EBY. We've actually got it piped into the system. Yes. Okay, so the comment there is you can use it to figure out what your smart meter is doing too. Anyway, yeah, so for a while I had, I piped our repeater stuff into this. We're direct plugged now to a Raspberry Pi but anyway, there's a lot of things you can do. So how do you put this all together? So the hardware is the Raspberry Pi 3, the RTL-SDR card, then you need to have a way to connect this card to an antenna. So this is a cheap way but anyone here who's a hand knows what is the rule about antennas? Higher and outside is better. So it's better to put this outside. If you can get an antenna where you're outside and you can see a lot of stuff. So higher and better. For some reason they're using these MCX connectors which are horrendous. They're tiny, tiny, tiny and so all the U.S., the U.S. RTL-SDR and the Newelluk guys I think ship like a bunch of converters so you can convert it to whatever favorite antenna version you have. This is because they intended for you to use this for digital television in your house but it's much better to have a different one. Power supply, they ship, the ones that ship with these kits are usually these wall warts. Be warned that these wall warts do not, everyone knows that. Wall warts are horrible. So you may want to have a better power supply and then you need a memory card for the operating system image. So that's all the hardware you ever need to put one of these together. I don't know if I put the price there. So I didn't put the price down but that's about anywhere from $55 to $75 and you could, if you live in a, not in LA for example, there are areas of the country where there's no scanner coverage at all. There's no what's going on and there's police calls and fire calls and what happens is no one has a clue. In California during the fire season there was a bunch of fires which happened and no one had any clue and no one else could help them. That's the, part of the beauty of having this all on the internet is somebody in Philadelphia who wants to help out can log on and get information out to other people. So that's the hardware. Here's the software. Everyone who wants to set up a, if you haven't set up a Raspberry Pi there's a lot of tutorials on there. RaspberryPi.org has a lot of stuff. There's YouTube videos. It's not too difficult. You can either do it, there's a couple of variants. The easiest one is if you have a monitor and a keyboard and a mouse and internet connection you can connect it all up and you load the image on the card and you just follow the instructions. It really takes nothing at all. If you are an expert and you enjoy this stuff you can just flash your own image and you can SSH in. I actually do that on my cards just because I've done that for a long time. Headless, running them headless is great. You can turn off the monitor reports and everything else and just run what you want. Anyone who's done any of the security side turn everything off that you don't need. I use Raspbian. That is what I've got running on the software on the basic stuff. How do you put this all together? Well, if I stop leaning at that. You install Lane which is the encoder, the audio encoder. Anyone here has done any audio encoding before? Basically, what audio encoding does takes an audio signal and it puts whatever format you need. For anything streaming on the internet a lot of people use MP3 format because that's pretty widely supported. That works. This is a horrible color I realize now for everyone sitting in the back but the RTL-SDR project is you get from GitHub. Everyone knows what GitHub is. GitHub is big for the people who don't. It's a big repository of code out there on the internet. It's all free and you can grab the latest version or the release version. If you're so inclined you can add your own version or create your own version of code and the SDR stuff is over there. One thing to know is there are drivers that make this SDR card work like a digital TV card. The biggest thing you have to do is tell it not to be a digital TV card. So you have to blacklist those drivers. In addition if you want to stream this to the internet which is the powerful part of this so if you can do this as a technical person you'll get thousands and thousands of people running this. During the Paradise Fire I think they probably had 30,000, 40,000 people listening trying to figure out what's going on. Broadcastify right now is the best way to do that. You have to create an account and they give you a special key and you put that key in the software and that allows you to put something up there. It does take a little while. They have to approve your account. You can also set up your personal streaming server. We actually have our own setup, Icecast. Icecast is a piece of software that you can take in as many audio streams as you want and do your own internet radio station or you can put all your ham radio feeds into there whatever you want. That's the other piece of it. Before you connect anything to Broadcastify GQRX is the software that runs on Linux that you can run SGR and look at whatever out there. You can see a FM station, 93.9 in some place and that is what a waveform looks like. You can listen to AM broadcast, you can listen to FM broadcast, you can listen to pretty much anything that puts out an RF signal, you can actually hear. In fact, there was a request by the Coast Guard last week. There's somebody with a VHF handheld somewhere, I think in Torrance or something like that who keeps on putting out fake Mayday calls. I went, boy, you know why someone should figure out what they're saying, hey, does anyone know who's doing this or help us? Well, someone built the system, believe it or not, using this exact setup and instead of one of these cards, they have four cards and it triangulates where a signal is. And they use the same exact setup, it's the same hardware, same software with an additional package on top and it'll map it out on a map where a signal is. So you could do that. Yeah, I hope so. Yeah, so this is pretty powerful. And it's amazing what you can do. Yes? What's the metal dish? Yeah, so this is a ground plane. So anytime you have an antenna, usually you need a counterpoint of some sort. And a metal dish works. Another thing that a lot of people use is, you know, something big and metal in your house like your refrigerator. You know, that works. So that works pretty well. It makes a huge difference on these cards to have that. I'm not going to go through all the details, but basically there's a config file for figuring out your stream and there's a software called RTL FM which is used to take that RTL card, all the stuff off this little card and encode it. And there's a lot of tutorials online, a lot of walk-throughs, but at least you know this is kind of what you have to do. There's actually one on Broadcastify as well. If anyone has a question about all that, I have my contact info on the last slide. So you can take and you can, oh, I mentioned AM. So if you're interested in what's going on at LAX, planes going back and forth, you can actually listen. You can both watch what they are doing through that ADS-B and you can actually listen to the tower using this card. So you'd have to use two cards if you want to do both at the same time. But anyway, there's a lot of options there. I'm not going to go through how to do it there, but give people an idea of how that works. So RF10s, an outside antenna is always better than the inside antenna. That does make a difference on these cards. You can plug any other radio. You want an outdoor antenna if you can, but this works if you don't have anything else. The other thing is if you're at a repeater site or if you happen to be next to an AM radio site, I don't know if anyone lives next to an AM radio site. You can hear their AM radio through your keys and your shower and your braces and whatever else. You might need a filter, and they actually sell filters for different bands, or you can build one, which is another talk. Disco and antennas work great for scanners. If anyone's seen a disco and antenna, I'll show you a disco and antenna real quick. Put that in my presentation, but anyway. Yeah, so that's what a disco looks like. Those work great for reception of most frequencies. And then there's actually a 1090 antenna. There's a great antenna from Flight Aware, which is a 1090 antenna, which looks like that. You can build one of these, by the way. There's a bunch of plans online, and they're not too difficult, but that one does work pretty well. You cannot, actually. No, so the way that these cars work and with the TV transmission, unless someone else knows differently, this can't decode U.S. television. You can take it to Europe. It'll work. Yeah, that's right. Encryption scheme is different. Yeah, so let's see here. So let's see here. All right, what's going to show... Oh yeah, so if you haven't seen Broadcastify, let's see if we can get to... So if you haven't seen the site, you can see what the most popular radio, radio channels are. And if you click into most of them, most of them are run by amateur radio operators. And a lot of them do have the old, may even have them on your PC, connected to an old scanner, but this is a far better solution. Because as a dedicated thing, it's not whether your PC's up or not, and you don't have to buy an expensive scanner. This gives you a list of the kinds of things that are happening and how many people are listening. So if you ever want to know what's going on, you can see where the something's on fire. Do you know what I mean? So, okay, let's see here. If you want to help, if you know how to put together something like this, you know, Raspberry Pi Linux, you can be a huge resource to the community. You would be amazed how many people are just eager to do something like this for their community because they want to know what's going on. Especially, I mentioned California because of fires. Anytime there's any kind of emergency, they look online for scanner feeds, for any information, and there's often, it's not there. And the only thing that's missing is somebody like you, someone like you who knows how to put this stuff together, probably can do it in their sleep, and put it on the internet. And it's really the spirit of open source, the conference. It's open sourcing information. It's taking stuff that normally is proprietary, hard to get, and making it available. This is a very affordable platform. If you have questions, you can email me. My email does not match my old call sign. That's my old call sign. And so, feel free to contact me. Any questions? Yes, you can do all the Marine Band stuff. Yeah, so all the Coast Guard stuff. If you have an up converter, you can actually do all the HF stuff, too. On the planes, there's not a map of where the scanners are. There are maps of where the holes are, though. Oh, do they? Yeah, so the Commodore with Flight Raider has it. So you can figure out where the nodes are. Yes. The question is, how is it below 300 megahertz on the new... So this antenna is a short antenna designed for whatever the DVB standard is. So if you want to receive something that's a lot lower, you want a lot longer antenna. So it does the... I mentioned the discones are a lot better because they're arranged, but you could also just build a really, really long wire. And that helps. It helps a huge amount. Because these are really dinky antennas. Do you have another VHF? Yes, yes. Yeah, for VHF and UHF, which was the public safety frequencies, this is okay. So, yeah. Yes. Yeah, so the question is, are these people untrunked and unencrypted? The answer is yes, with some exceptions. It depends on where you're living. If you live in San Bernardino County, sorry. Anyone remember the old... where that... that cop went rogue and was shooting other cops? So, Riverside, yeah. So what happened is, if anyone knows what happened, the scanner guys were listening to that. At some point, they cornered them in a cabin. And what happened is the police said, oh, let's burn that MF down. And that got out. And so then they said, oh, well, you know, we don't want to have anyone know what we're doing because you might compromise safety. And really what it was, is we don't want anyone to know what we're doing. So if you ever have any involvement with public officials, because all it does is make... you know, it helps to be open, I think, to the public for law enforcement and fire and everything else. For the fires that we were looking at this summer and helping out with, if that stuff wasn't encrypted, like in Paradise, there'd be a lot of people who would be dead because there'd be zero information, right? And it's not only the public that uses this information, it's the press. It's the radio stations and the TV reporters and they also use all this information. So it can be really valuable. Questions? Actually, it's illegal. It's illegal to do, but these cards do receive the frequencies where cell phones are. So you may know that there's people who, in the government, legally tracking people's cell phones. Yes. Yeah, so... Oh, yeah. So don't do this either. These cards are pretty cool. But this is the same technology that car thieves are using on jeeps. So if anyone's heard this in San Diego, they've caught car thieves. What they do is they come up to a jeep. Jeeps are the specific car and they hit a button and they extend the key fob from inside your house to the jeep and turn the car on drive away. And how they're doing that, they don't tell you that, but it's one of these cards. And they just re-transmit it closer to the jeep. There are a lot of things you can do good and bad with these, but they're a lot of fun. Any other questions? Tracking the ISS? I mean, in terms of... Yeah, so that... No, you can't track where the ISS is. You can receive what the ISS is doing. You can receive the radio channels but technically you could. Yeah, technically you could. Yeah. If you do want to track the ISS, there's actually a site which is developed by a ham radio operator called N2IO which you can track the ISS. And that involves a lot of math and orbit prediction and all that stuff, but... Yes. Okay, so all that... Let's see here. Any other questions? Did you miss? No? Good, okay. Well, thank you very much. And if you have any questions, feel free to email me or tell me if we're ready to go and get started. Test, test, test. Does this work, too? I'll just repeat your questions if you have any questions. Okay, my name's Joe Ayers. I'm one of the contributors to the Arden firmware. I've been doing that for three, four years now back when there were Linksys and have been contributing ever since. So I'm part of what would be considered the core group of the Arden project. As you may know, Arden is now 501C3. So we're now a nonprofit. And if you do go on to a little plug here onto Amazon or other places, there's a way to reference Arden to, you know, send a little... bit our way to help fund additional development with devices that we want to port to and help the process. Okay, let me... We'll talk about the goals. I want to talk a little bit about the design of the Arden network and why it is that it is. Go into some little detail more into the Linux open source embedded platform and cover a little bit about the GitHub and how we build it. It's something that many of you may have the skill sets and have an interest to get involved as well. And then go into the routing, the DNS architecture, how all that works in building this network. Jump from there into deployment considerations. Get a little bit more into the microwave characteristics and what you have to be concerned about when you deploy this in practice, particularly in longer distance links which works very, very differently than what you would find in your home. And then bringing it all together and looking at, you know, what it is today. I think we've been talking about you probably saw it in the booth and the exhibit booth and other prior presentations from more than others questions. I'm happy to dive in a little bit. I've got enough slides here to won't cover the entire time. I expect a little bit of if there's interest in particular areas we can dive into that. So Arden is, of course, Ham Radio. We've been talking about that a lot in this track. It is non-commercial. We do experiment. We self-train private recreation, radio sport contesting and emergency communications. And that's a big part of what the Arden Project is about, is we're focusing this application for emergency communications preparedness for responders. So we'll see that focus. But we expect all the other purposes in Arden to be used for these other purposes as well. If all we did was emergency communications we'd get a very few less people involved. We like people that like to experiment and advance it and contribute to it and help with the training aspects so that we have a capability that we know we can deliver when there is an emergency. It's off-grid. So this network, if we had a group building a network in Las Vegas or Phoenix and here in Orange County and we are all building this network independently and we were all designing it independently when we tried to join them together we would run into problems as to how we architected our network and what IP address range we gave and other aspects of the network. So we're solving that problem with Arden. We are creating a configuration in architecture that the nodes automatically do. So that we know when Phoenix and Southern California start growing together and we expect that in the next few years that when we meet in the middle it'll just work. We expect that when we go to an incident and we need to go deploy very quickly a network that it will work. We have to go have several days of planning and architecture and design and get different groups from different areas to come to agreement on how it's going to work. We don't have time for that. We have to go to a site an incident, set it up and know that it's going to work. So that's a very key architecture issue for the Arden project. Now we would do sacrifice optimizations here and there but that's a very key thing and you'll find other groups that deploy networks in Ham Radio. But the deployment is very, very limited because it's very hard for those that don't have an IT skill set to go deploy those. So these nodes auto-configure themselves and have a built-in architecture and we'll go into that a little bit more. So basic IT skill sets aren't needed. It helps the basic level. It's the guru level that we don't need anymore. Low cost that's a very key thing here as well is if we were deploying at tower sites and it was costing thousands of dollars and you had to spend thousands of dollars in your home just to get on board that's going to limit it. These devices are very, very low cost. So and then services of course we want this network to work with all the standard services that are out there your Wi-Fi and your cell phone standard VoIP phones this is the technology of today it's what businesses use it's what Red Cross uses it's what everyone uses today it's all IP based. So what is the architecture it's open source Linux we're currently in the builds at 4.9.152 and that follows through from OpenWRT that we're based on top of it's build root you know an embedded build environment so that Linux can be framework so that you can just set some config files and target and build Linux for a very specific environment so it's a very complex but it's very, very powerful and then OpenWRT they're bringing to the table packages of all the different capability that you could pull together and build your platform that you're going to work with so everything is a packaged environment if I want a wireless driver I'm going to go get a particular package. The ATH9K is the one we use for wireless if I want to go to a 802.11ac then I start looking at other packages that are the ATH10K and I start bringing those in everything's a package when you put together this environment and build the platform of course the wireless is a big package that we're using the other one of course is Optimize Link Stank Routing OLSR there's several of packages out there for routing we've been using OLSR for a number of years and we'll probably start, you know, we're starting to consider and look at some of the other options out there their packages as well you bring them in and you configure them things like Batman is something that we'll be looking at if you're familiar these are all mobile ad hoc routing protocols so let's get into a little more detail so here is the basic recipe if you want to get involved and build the firmware images with Arden now this is all on GitHub and I'll try to switch over just briefly as well just directly to the GitHub site to introduce it but this is all you have to do to build all the images there are some prerequisites I can show you that that are on the readme and the GitHub site as well but it's standard GitHub you're going to clone it down have your repository of code there you're going to edit a config file to put your call sign in it to identify the images as you build them and you're just going to do a make and the make is doing the entire process of building the images the default is the TP link and the ubiquity products and then you build the microtech it adds them as a second make on top of it so the repo has config files and there's a config directory down here for all of the packages and all of the open WRT configuration so it's under the configs in location and then we have patches where we patch on top of that like the wireless driver and other things and then as we do the make it's going to put it in the firmware down here created by the firmware so it will clone as part of the make the open WRT repository and then as you build it it will put your images in the firmware directory here and then there's some test results you can look at where it's just static code analysis to look for syntax errors and other things to let you know about if you're developing it so how many people use github are pretty familiar with that okay so we got a few quite a few actually how many people are already ham radio licensed okay that's good good about similar how many want to get a ham radio license good good so I think the test sessions are finishing up already if you didn't already go but next year they'll be here or look up your local ham club for that so when we look in the patches directory just to give you an idea of what kind of patches are on top of open WRT the notation here is as the it starts with a zero these are patches that should be an open WRT they're all upstream patches and we want to go push those up to open WRT or farther upstream like OSR or some of the other groups and have them fix it and just we just inherit that benefit we don't have to manage that patch anymore we'll do this early so like you see these TP link patches up here this is bringing in support for these devices before open WRT has support for these so we've got a guy Andrew in Houston area that has been just one right after another getting these devices working in advance of open WRT so we're really excited about that you'll see some other things in here you know LDF microtech ones so there's some patches that are not yet in microtech releases so we still have to put those in then we get into the 700s these are truly the Arden specific patches that we'll always have on top of open WRT like changing the frequency and shifting it into the ham bands sliding up or down depending on the band so extended spectrum enabling a country code registry database setting our special SSID at boot so that we have a mesh node these are all the things that are unique there's a nano XW switch the nano station is a nightly build now make both ports work interchangeably before they did it but we needed some specific driver patches down at that level for the switches to get that to work so this is all in the patches directory and you know if you get into this and dig a little more you'll see that some of these are actually patches of patches there's a nested level because open WRT pulls in lots of patches upstream before they get further upstream into some driver into the Linux kernel so we sometimes have to patch to get the update going there so how's the mesh node configured we create by on every device these four interfaces there's a Wi-Fi interface now this is our mesh RF interface it's meant to reach out and discover other ardent devices and communicate with them over RF and so only other ardent devices would be communicating over that interface DTD link this is the other interface that's doing the same protocol over RF it's just doing it over a cat 5 cable so that we can route just as we could route from one node to another on a given band on 2 GHz or 5 GHz we can discover in route to another node 2 GHz, 5 GHz node so they can route between bands so we call that a device-to-device linking it's on a physical interface so we use VLAN tags to define all of the interfaces to the device so a device-to-device link is always a VLAN 2 a LAN interface so that we can put LAN devices just like on a home router the LAN interfaces are all untagged just as your home router would be very same kind of concept and then a WAN interface same as a home to get to the internet or a foreign network that has a VLAN tag of 1 so if you have an ardent node remember most of these devices are meant to go up towers we're not going to run up 4 cat 5 cables to the device we're going to run 1 cable up to it right? so to get access to all of those interfaces we need VLAN tags to trunc down all of those interfaces the same kind of thing that you would do between switches so putting it all together then is this is the building block with these interfaces for these mesh nodes to start communicating either over a physical cable over RF and a tunnel going out the internet over the WAN to another mesh node somewhere else to join islands so we're discovering and making mesh network connections Wi-Fi, DTD link and out tunnels out the WAN for those three discovery mechanisms to find other mesh nodes so let's put it together a little more start using that building block as the network starts to build out so what is the OSR role the optimized link state routing so it's the protocol that's going to discover other mesh nodes to start building the network now let's set the context here real quickly at a wireless level we're making an 802.11 connection right that's a layer 2 connection right there's no so that's all defined by an 802.11 spec well we also have a cat5 cable we've made a connection at a layer 2 with a cat5 cable between devices and we could also go out the WAN over a tunnel and make that connection out of a VPN type tunnel to connect mesh islands together so now they start having this layer 2 connection across all these physical media RF cables tunnels over the internet so we have a layer 2 now we need to start putting a layer 3 routing mechanism in place so OSR what it's going to do is it knows about all these interfaces on the node it's going to start sending out hello packets on a UDP 698 port broadcasting out hello packets on each of these interfaces anybody there so if we begin to have an RF connection on 802.11 and someone else is at that layer 2 and they're connected with an 802.11 connection the other guy's doing the same thing hello hello hello they're just sending out are you there are you there every second every 2 seconds just looking to discover so as soon as they hear back then they start exchanging the IP information of who they know about so they just start exchanging information with OSR and then they begin to set the routing tables of all the IP addresses all across the network that everybody knows about so every node knows about every IP address across every mesh node across that network as it begins to extend and then we then OSR creates routing tables now as you may know there's in Linux there's policy in routing tables there's not just one there can be many routing tables and then you have a search order through those routing tables you know to find the first hit for a route of where it goes to so OSR is now setting a routing table that says here's how I get to every other mesh node send it to the next top guy I know he's over here here's a routing table for a LAN of a node so if I ever get an IP address I'm trying to get to I've got a small subnet for that LAN and it routes it over to the LAN of that node mesh nodes are layer 3 routers it's not going to broadcast and flood a wireless network that reaches across 50 links in Southern California there was several hundred individual links on RF on the mesh here in Southern California if we had a broadcast go out we don't want to flood every single link just every all the nodes that are out there would just flood it and bring it to its knees so we can't broadcast packets going past a mesh node they're only going to route to specific IP addresses for the data as it goes through from end to end now one thing I didn't mention I probably wrote it here the IP addresses are all derived from the MAC you don't have to go in and set IP addresses on these device that's how they get coordinated so that it all works it's a random scheme based on the MAC address so each interface will get derived from that now if you look at how many possibilities there are in a class C 10.x subnet class C subnet millions a million or more for us to start worrying about having IP conflicts so we have plenty of growth room for what we're doing and then if we do we can manually override it I'm sorry class A thanks for correcting me class A address scheme but it's not a class A subnet per se there are many subnets defined at each land and then it's a layer 3 level routing scheme there's no netting in all of this by default so the question was is there any netting involved and not by default, no everything's just a 10.x address it is possible to create a land subnet that is a net that jumps to just like your home router a 192 type subnet and that is possible generally we don't do that because it limits you on if I had a VoIP phone there and I'm netted then I start getting more complexity with audio streams coming through that are being blocked going into that net into that 192 subnet so VoIP phones and other things it's more complicated to get it working with port forwarding and things like that so generally just leave it as a 10.x and it's open routing there's no firewalls inside the mesh network well the mesh nodes themselves the question was should we be thinking about firewall every mesh node is a firewall and is locked down to be able to access it so that you can't get in and relatively maliciously damage it very almost no ports are open except what's absolutely required and then there's no way to get into it to get control of it through that service port so let's talk about microwave characteristics here real quick we were talking about I think in one of the earlier ones RadioMobile is a good site to go to for the Fresno zone but let's talk about what does this mean to us or help us do and fundamentally the Fresno zone it's a cone from end to end it helps us visualize where a signal when it reflects is going to help when it arrives at the receiver or hurt when it gets to the receiver so the there's a formula you can look it up by the way the wiki site for this is terrible and almost misinformation on some of the Fresno information don't go there go to the RadioMobile site look for RadioMobile for that so if you look at the zone 1 that is a line where if the signal we're bouncing off that line and it goes into the receiver the phases of the signal add together it helps it at the receiver in fact you want signals to bounce off that line because the energy is coming back in and it adds and gets more signal the noise ratio at the receiver it helps the second zone the second line if a signal bounces off that and comes to the receiver it's 180 degrees out of phase it cancels out at the receiver you lose energy going into the receiver at that point it hurts you the third one you're back to it helps the fourth one it hurts you it's a picket fence kind of picture the energy where it is at the receiver side when you get out to the third and fourth zone lines we're getting far enough out that the energy is starting to get a lot smaller it's not playing a significant factor it's really the first, second, third ranges in there that you're concerned about but to give you an idea if you look at the picture on the left there between buildings with the truck under it that's 700 meters just under a kilometer so the first zone is 2.8 meters to give you a perspective on where that reflection point would be so if I look at that one that one's better because that truck pretty close to that line and anything that reflects off the top of that truck and gets the receiver is helping me it's adding to it and furthermore if it hit the side of the truck on the second zone it's not getting to the receiver it's not hurting and out of phase and subtracting from getting into the receiver so if you're from a wireless design perspective if you can run a signal where a top of the hill is right at the Fresnel zone 1 that hill's now blocking zone 2 that would hurt but it's letting everything in zone 1 that helps get into the receiver so if I look at the second scenario I've got a building there that's pretty close to the second zone line so if that energy bounces off that roof on the second zone and goes up to the receiver it's hurting me it's canceling out at the receiver so that's going to hurt so we want to avoid those kind of conditions probably the worst thing you can do would have a lake or body of water that's exactly at somewhere right around the second Fresnel zone distance and a link going across it so you have a reflection path that's hurting you so it's the even one second, fourth, sixth those are the bad ones fifth, those are the good ones that help got it okay so talk a little bit about the modulation characteristics of an 802.11 signal and what it means for for long distance links because it's very different than what's happening inside your house very short distances very short timing it's ricocheting off of everything in your house very complex of all the reflection signals but the timing of it inside your house is very very short compared to a 40 mile link so we have to think about some the timing is very important from a performance perspective so what is an 802.11 signal well it's not a spread spectrum signal for 802.11N A N 802.11B is a spread spectrum signal a very very different kind of modulation we don't do that anymore that's only a two gig spec for older devices nobody does that anymore so 802.11N it's got 64 carriers in the bandwidth and not all of those carriers have data on them they're modulated in a way to mitigate inter-channel interference and inter-carrier interference and modulated in a way that maximizes throughput in efficiencies so if I shrink it from a 20 megahertz channel which is what you have in your home and I shrink it to 10 I still end up with 64 carrier waves it still has an FFT chip in there that still has 64 bit or 64 point FFT that's still doing that it's still going to be 64 carrier waves no matter what bandwidth I have there so if I go from a 20 megahertz to a 10 I'm going to have the same energy and a little bit more signal-to-noise ratio still 64 carrier waves but to keep and this is very important we have to keep orthogonality which means that each carrier wave is not interfering with with another in a perfect environment and to keep orthogonality if I shrink it to 10 megahertz then what happens is I have to increase the symbol length how long I'm transmitting a symbol so each one of these rectangles on the floor represents a symbol so as I shrink it that symbol just got twice as long so from like a how much energy per bit I'm transmitting it's the same from 20 to 10 but I've shrunk it down and I get more signal-to-noise ratio I can get longer distance okay and then there's a guard interval that you can see here between the symbols we transmit a symbol we wait we have all this fading over a long distance so as we get out 40, 50, 60 miles that fading if the symbol was too short I got this ricochet energy coming in after the symbol supposed to be done I have to get longer symbol times the farther and farther away I get because that reflection energy will take longer to get there so everything has to get stretched out in the timing when we go to a long distance link that's why we go down to a 10 megahertz channel because if I stay on 20 first of all I have less signal-to-noise ratio because it's stretched the same power stretched over longer and my symbols timing is shorter so the fading and ricochet starts coming in after the symbol and I start getting more errors so bigger bandwidth not as much signal-to-noise ratio and the fading ricochets need more time to get there so that's why we have to go to shorter bandwidths on longer distance links question is absolutely great point as we are on the receiver end and we're in 10 megahertz we're now only dealing with half the noise but the other fact is because it's taking twice as long to transmit the symbol I only have half the data rate so we've jumped from so let's talk about data rates and see how the long distance begins to impact data rates so with 802.11 in MIMO multiple input-output we can do one data stream on MCS-0 through 7 that means that both antennas are sending the same data stream and both antennas are receiving the same data stream on the other side MCS-8 rates in 802.11 that's two antennas different data we're doubling up going out each polarity so we can get twice the data through that three data streams on long distance it's not optimal we're not going to do that and the reason is on a polarized radio wave when we send them at 90 degrees they they don't interfere with each other very much if I try to do three data streams I'd have to do 60 degrees and there'd be three planes of polarity well at 60 degrees they start interfering with each other more I get more data loss so it's not optimal for a long distance leak you're not going to find I don't even know if you can find any three polarity, three antenna long distance dishes probably we don't make them because it's not feasible or practical so at long distance links the signal to noise ratio it's king everything is depending on having enough signal to noise ratio at a long distance link to be able to receive that signal so at a long distance link if you don't have enough to do two data streams then it drops down to the mcs7 and sends both out both polarizations and combines them to have enough signal to noise ratio to decode it so these radios are just incredibly smart let's just look at the rates real quick I hope you can see it so these are the mcs rates defined in the spec from 0 to 15 and you can see mcs0 it's just a binary psk I got a radio carrier wave I'm modulating it the phase of it 180 degrees 0 or 1 and I'm just modulating it I go up a notch now I've got four different phases that I'm modulating them they're 25 degrees apart and I'm trying to detect that on the other side and then I just keep going up now we've got quadrature AM 16 all the way up to 64 we're getting more and more bits in a symbol that's going from end to end so you have to cut this in half this is a 20 MHz channel so if you cut it in half you'll get half of this on a 10 MHz channel so also the long guard interval between symbols we're not going to see that's the 800 nanosecond interval that's the long one the short is the 400 you're not going to see short it's just not enough time in there in long distances so everything's going to be under the 130 at the 20 or divide that by 2 65 for the max you'll get but we absolutely get the max 65 Mbps on 40 mile lengths it definitely okay now in the driver in this HHH9K driver about 10% of the packets it searches around at these rates to find out which one gives me the best throughput so it measures it in real time of the data you're sending and it keeps in the metrics that it shows you look like this this is an actual table of a 40 mile link from Pleasant Peak to Ukipa and the A on the best rate that's the first choice B's the second C's and so on and you can see the actual success statistics and the attempts of packets looking around on which rates to use so these drivers are incredibly smart and this is to a specific station if I had multiple stations out there it keeps this statistics on every station every packet it sends out to a different station could be at a different modulation scheme and rate and error correction coding every other packet it's amazing on how smart these things are getting and every imaginable kind of coverage on the antenna we've seen a lot of these today from the dishes to sectors here's the micro tech HAPAC light that we've been talking a lot about so we bring it all together we've got all these mesh nodes on a tower some are point to point some are sector coverage we just run them down with the network cables into the radio room and we go up to these radio rooms and we have people with cabinets of radio gear and inductors and matching the antennas and we've got one little switch so all we have we're not dealing with RF coming down into the radio tower we're just dealing with just standard network traffic and power over ethernet this is why microwave links 10, 15, 20 years ago hundreds of thousands of dollars T1 1.54 megabits per second they had RF coming down into the radio room this has been disruptive technology by ubiquity and micro tech and others in the last 10, 15 years that are just replacing all that and it's also replacing if you look at what the FCC is doing they're looking at proposals for the frequencies from in 5 gig from your unlicensed frequencies all the way up past through 6 gigahertz to convert that entire range into 802.11 in technology because the older licensing that is very, very inefficient is just not using the resource very well and this technology is beginning to take hold on all industries in all microwave data communications all broadcasts with audio and digital TV is all OFDM it is becoming the king of the standard now your audio and TV broadcasts are not 64 carrier waves they've got a lot more in there there's some different applications of it that are specialized for those technologies 802.11 is standard on that on this 64 carrier waves generally as we go deploy these you're going to start out with is that showing you're going to start out with some fixed backbone node out there at a tower site you've got a remote mountaintop so now you can get different counties talking to each other you've got a hospital over there you've got a ham deployed in a shelter you can now communicate to them you can have your station set up and go to any incident site anywhere in orange county literally and do exactly this we've got the emergency operation centers and police departments with the ability to do this kind of data communication for them let's say you don't have a direct line of sight up to your fixed backbone link well then you can have a relay node that you can set up to bounce around it or get around obstacles many doing mesh or having go stations to go kits for being able to do this note this one fixed or deployed relay node it's got two antennas on it specialized for that it might be a little local cell coverage to get several stations out there different channels we just need different channels to maximize throughput could we do this all in one channel yes we can only transmit one place and if they have any they can get any energy between any of these links to any other then only one guided time can transmit then you've got things like hidden nodes where we can't see other nodes but we couldn't both transmit the same time to the tower all those issues come into play but generally to maximize throughput you want to isolate a channel for each major pathway coverage area backbone link downlink to a cell coverage area and then of course it can grow like this within three years without having this kind of definition where it auto configures and assigns IP addresses and automatically establishes routing we would never be able to grow like this that we have in the three years that since it started so we expect in another three years we'll probably be linked with Phoenix and Las Vegas and pushing up to the Bay Area and Fresno there's groups in all those areas and we're getting to the point we're going to be meeting in the middle so I got a whole bunch of pictures here just to give you some ideas about what's out there some of these you've been seeing before but here's for example backbone links high grounds this is a palomar it's actually just slightly larger than 48 miles and this is doing upwards of 50 megabits on this link I'll have to look at that actual rate table so we can kind of see what it's doing and bring it out these are generally going to be your two foot dishes you know rocket dish to get that kind of distance and you're going to be in this particularly if it's on a tower site and you have to pay a climber you're going to be in it for hundreds to thousand plus dollars to get this up on a 100 foot tower this happens to be somebody's home in Palomar and they can just walk out and put it up so it's just you know no cost not a commercial site easy access to it here's your sectors so that you can do sector covers coverage 120 degree 90 60 you know they make antennas for everything here's all the tower sites this is Elsinore peak that one of those might be Mount Ote I'm not sure what the other site is this is the one from or showed this earlier at their Camarillo Hills is that right or yeah out in the wild node on solar this is when I'm running total solar out in the wild captured a fox one day on motion detect going by there this is just a couple of RV batteries Walmart you know 105 hour amp batteries amp hour batteries I've got a 300 watt solar panel there solar panels a little more than I need the reason I have it is it can still generate enough power under clouds just to run three nodes a camera and a raspberry pie it's drawing a little over an amp of power on a 12 volt volt system and this site's been live for over a couple of years 2024 by seven here's one in Redlands on a top of a tower so it just has a base plate one of the tanks and a base plate with bricks weight on it and goes up I think that might have been a field day on the left just set that up and that's a nano station but you can buy reflectors low cost reflectors to increase the take a 45 degree sector and then turn it into a spot beam to focus all the energy and get much longer distances so that that gives you kind of a dual purpose device if you need to use something for wider coverage or or do a spot beam with that question so the raspberry pies at my side if that's what you're talking about so you said the question is is what do we use the raspberry pie for at these sites in my case I'm using the raspberry pie to the charge controller so it's a service provider right so application hosting and I'm pulling from the charge controller all of the charge information battery health and everything and now and then I can download and do my charts as to the charge condition and health of the solar site but I could host lots of other things on that at that site like mesh chat or a PBX or whatever right we can put it we put it at a 24 by 7 central site we minimize traffic across the network and we get more high availability that the site's intended to be the one on the right here that's just a nano station you know someone either an apartment or they have an office and they just put it on the window but the interesting thing about this is the RF energy and the haze how it's cleared all of the haze off of the window from the RF energy so in public service so every year I think it's the fifth year now at least for probably the fifth year San Juan Capistrano has an annual parade they call it the Swallows Day Parade and they bring in the Orange County Big Rig this is a huge semi tractor truck mobile command center for Orange County Sheriff with these huge slide outs and what we do is we put cameras all around the parade route and we stream them all into into the mobile command center so you can see here are the pictures all along the parade route here's the camera hiding up here I think it's on this pole might be just out of sight there that's just out of a truck along the parade route and one's behind on the far left that's behind the Swallows Bar where there's lots of gang activity literally captured people getting punched and knocked out and arrested and that sort of thing and the video actually going for the police reports and all the activities beyond that so we space them all around we generally have about six cameras and then we this is inside the Orange County mobile command center you can see in the back there's Dispatch Center so they're managing 60, 70, 100,000 people it's pretty big everybody comes into the parade in that area very congested wifi doesn't work all that great when you have all these 100,000 people in that area so in the ham channels we have clear sailing we can stream all this in with no problem what this did is it gives the sheriff situational awareness before this video they were waiting for officers to radio back what's happening if there's a crowd issue, if there's a gang fight or some situations going on they have no idea they're waiting to hear back with this they're just watching it they can see crowd conditions they have situational awareness they love it, they come to us every year and we're providing this service so we're kind of irregulars in it this is in two weeks so we're down there in San Juan Cap if you're down there give me a call we can slip you in to see the inside here of the mobile command center if you have any interest in seeing any of that some of the applications putting it all together with just spinning up this network literally the night before and streaming this all into and putting it on the big screens in a mobile command center very good I have gone quite a ways we still have a few minutes if you want to for questions or any issues and get into any of that technical detail I can make them available I'll get them on the Arden website they usually post a lot of the presentations that we do there so I'll get that up there as well this is in two weeks this yeah, when's Baker to Vegas of March okay so they're the same same times yeah, interesting so the question is just timing of events in the area LA Marathon in Vegas and the Swalls Day Parade are all the same weekends so we've got to stretch stretch out they're different counties okay so yeah this common question that comes up the question was how do we deal with security encryption just to kind of little history real quickly the Part 97 licensing doesn't have the word encryption but what it does say and where it came out of is World War II and Cold War area where what it does say is we can't obscure messages that's the language of obscure that's used in there I think the key there is is these were these were created in World War II and the Cold War the bottom line is is that they need to be modernized for today's technology and for the risks and security concerns of today today the concern would be we need to encrypt because of the ability to be damaged or hurt infected from that but the rules are going to need some time to catch up to doing that now today we do understand obscured information we don't obscure it but for example when we talk on a voice radio the hospital will obscure patient and sensitive information and will transmit that obscured information to a destination as that entity asked us to do we're not going to we're not obscuring it if the Red Cross if the Orange County Sheriff came to me with this mobile command center and they said yet my dispatch and my data network connected back to their data center at Loma Ridge in Orange County and they wanted to do a VPN tunnel over this network and they needed to do that for the services I would do that the entities asked me to do it it's fulfilling our purpose and of course when there's an emergency all the rules fall out the window in an emergency situation so it is controversial you will find some people that are very you know I'm going to literally interpret it and I shouldn't be doing that you're going to find people on the other end of that so you will find people in those so for me I want to serve the purpose and if I need to I will I wouldn't recommend on a daily basis doing encryption to do encryption we don't need to if we had a threat or a reason to then I would otherwise I don't want to make change to the rules in an appropriate way that's right I wouldn't want to the question here is about authentication and command and control of a remote node that's on this network so put in context with amateur satellites there has been part 97 rules that support encryption for command and control of a satellite if somebody were to maliciously do something the cost is very high to the community if they were to damage that it would make it unusable we apply that I think most of this that manage nodes apply the same understanding with a mesh node up at the tower site I use SSH all the time to go to that node and do administrative work on it so I do do that correct question so the question is what is the cost of a dish at a 40 mile link so to give you an example we hired a very expensive tower climber at Elsinore Peak to put in a dish for us and we didn't get the link rates that we expected and we were a little rushed and getting things in we were running out of daylight to try to come back to it and fine tune it so we started looking around a little bit out of this 40 mile link on a rocket dish and we expected 65 we expected that so we started looking around a little bit and I took a picture of it from the side profile and that dish was literally 10, 15 degrees pointing in the air we're still getting 28, 30 megabit link rates and you know these dishes at 40 miles if you have a 3 or these are typically like a 5 degree beam width at 40 miles that 5 degree beam width could be 10 miles I don't know 5 to 10 miles I don't know what it is but pretty wide but certainly you want to you can tune it in so and tune it it's just time and attention so the question was there's an easy way you're on your roof to get it tuned right if you're pointing up to a tower site somewhere so in the nightly builds there's now a new audio feature and a signal to ratio chart so what you can do is you can access it over wifi or on your phone or you just turn the volume up on your computer and as the frequency audio goes up it's more signal to noise as it goes down direct TV has this for some of theirs you just turn up the volume loud enough so you can hear it when you're on the antenna and then you just the highest pitch you've peaked it out question