 So good morning everyone. Our next speaker today in Ham Village is Jason W2LDU here to talk to you about the RF Dark Arts. Let's give him a big warm Ham Radio Village. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. All right. I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview of how I came into Ham Radio in the past year or so and then give you a little demonstration of SDR and sort of how to find things on SDR and we'll go from there. So what's my background? I identify as a hacker. I joined a local hacker space about seven years ago. Started my surround with Arduino, wiring stuff. I'm an amateur photographer. So I have a decent background in electronics and stuff. But radio just always seemed like magic to me. There's a lot of different things in radio that just don't make sense. Throwing together a bunch of coils of wiring and capacitors coming from Arduino doesn't seem like it would do much. So a few years ago I started going on some road trips with friends and we wanted to communicate easier within the car. Sort of figure out rest stops and entertain ourselves, that sort of thing. And I got a GMRS license and this is a test-free radio license. You apply online. It's $70 and you keep it for 10 years and you get a lot more use out of it than say the Motorola family radios. You can go much higher power. You can use repeaters to have a much higher range. And this was sort of my stepping stone. An easy way to play around with radio and be able to transmit without having to take a test. But GMRS still isn't very good. It's sort of a niche radio service that's mainly used for families. The license actually covers your direct family. So everyone in your household, cousins, and step whatever. But a lot of people use it for hunting or off-road. And there are large areas of the country that just don't have repeaters where you would have to stay within maybe 10 miles of each other to be able to talk. So I said, I think I should just get an amateur radio license. There's a lot of places online where you can take practice tests and just get an idea of what they're going to ask you. And I ran through one with zero preparation. And because of my background in Arduino, I got like 50% of it. I was really surprised that a good portion of the test is basic electronics and circuit design stuff that was stuff that I already knew. And the rest of it was like legal requirements and what you can and can't do and basically to keep you out of trouble. There's also a bunch of other resources online. This is a YouTube channel Hammer Radio Crash Course. They have a playlist going through every single question in the test explaining what exactly are they asking? Why is the right answer right? Why are the wrong answers wrong? And this along with just continuing practice tests allowed me to get a 34 to 35 on my test after maybe a month or two of prep. So now what? Well, obviously, I'm going to buy a bunch of radios. The other thing you want to do is listen. The test really doesn't prepare you for how to actually talk to each other and the kind of etiquette that you need to be on the radio. It just tells you like how to not burn yourself on RF and how to not get the feds knocking on your door. There are some other really great local resources. There are HamFest, which is just a large gathering of ham selling stuff, promoting their events. Really great for learning what's around you and what kind of other things are going on that you could participate in. Club meetings can be good. There are a lot of local small local radio repeater clubs. There's probably like 10 or 15 in my metro area that I could choose from. Those are a little bit more stuffy because they're like full events with minutes and garbage. But there's also much more casual events. So around me there is something called a ham feast, which is basically every Saturday night we would go just pick a random restaurant, go hang out, have dinner, and just be friends rather than talking about business. And then I started getting into APRS. And this is actually a digital packet mode where with your radio you can upload a packet with GBS coordinates, altitude, speed heading, text, what other channel you're monitoring so other people around you can talk to you. And this was really great for me because I went on a few road trips alone and I could just send my family a URL and they could see where I was and didn't require them to have a license or anything. They could just see where I was that day, where I was going. You can also receive packets from repeaters around you to sort of get an idea, lay of the land of what's out there. And you can also see the other people around you that are beaconing and communicate, either connect to them on whatever radio they're monitoring on or, you know, there's a lot of really cool stuff that you can do and see when you have a system that shows a lot of stuff that's around you and on the radio. There's also a program called Ecolink and you can run this on a mobile phone or on a desktop. This allows you to connect to repeaters all around the world. This was really cool because you can bounce around the US, bounce around the world, get an idea of what people are talking about, you know, connect with people back home wherever that may be. There's also amateur nets and this is where at a scheduled time it can be daily, weekly, monthly, a bunch of people get on a single repeater and go around and just say, you know, talk about what's going on in their life. There's a lot of different kinds as well. Around me there's a new ham net, so the people running it are much more accepting if someone, say, forgets to say the call sign or, you know, has a stupid, what would be a stupid question. They're really good for getting your footing on, transmitting on the radio and getting some questions answered. There's also a lot of emergency services on amateur radio and there are a few near me that can be really interesting to participate in from time to time. One of the recent ones asked, if water went out at your house, think about how long you would be able to stay there and be able to live before you need to bug out to somewhere else. Sort of get you thinking about what happens in an emergency and what things, what preparation you might need to shore up in your own life. So once I got comfortable and had a kidney to sell, I bought an HF radio to try and get out further. This is a map of people that I've heard from my home and this is all on less than 10 watts, which is a tiny amount of power for this kind of distance. We actually have a demo set up using this exact system, WhisperNet, which is meant for long range low power and it's a very interesting way to, you know, be able to say that you've talked to Ottawa. And I learned my lesson when I got into HF. When I first got my license, I just sort of bought every radio I saw that seemed interesting. And I ended up with a bunch of radios that could do mostly the same stuff. But with an HF radio, I really did my research, figured out what exactly I would need to hook it up to my computer to do digital modes. And then once I figured out exactly what I wanted, I got it and it was only, only $700 for the whole kit. But a lot of people might be interested in what you can do without a license. There are lots of websites online that allow you to stream basically anything you could think of. Broadcastify is a great website. They, this is showing on the top left is showing amateur radio repeaters around Las Vegas. So there's, you know, about 10 of them there. And most of these are streaming 24 seven, you can just hop on, click on it, listen like an internet radio station, sort of see what's going on. And then on the bottom, we have DMR radio. And so this is a digital mode for amateur radio. And because it's all digital, it all goes through the internet. And so they've set up websites so that you can just tap in at the source and all these are open to anyone. There's also something called WebSDR. And these are really expensive radio rigs, which allow you to listen to HF in shortwave radio. There's probably about 10 in the US. And it can be used by a lot of people at the same time. So you don't have to kick someone else off to see what's going on. And this can be a really cool way to sort of dip your feet into HF, or if you are interested in shortwave radio, it has basically every setting that you could think of to be able to listen to whatever is out there. You can also buy $30 SDR, which is what I'll be showing you today. These have a very wide range of receive. So you can get anything from AM or FM radio all the way up to in the gigahertz range, almost up to Wi-Fi. And then you can also get cheap radio for mobile listening on Amazon. But you have to be careful. These can get you into serious federal trouble if you do something wrong. One of the important things with AM radio is knowing where you should and shouldn't transmit and being doubly sure of that because it's a federal thing. So since NSDR can receive a wide range of things, what can it do? Well, like I said, you can listen to almost anything. You can track planes. Planes have a little transponder in them that give, again, GPS coordinates, altitude, heading, radio call sign. This is a very easy setup that can be done for less than $100. And you can see basically any airplane or helicopter that's within 150-200 miles of where you're at. These can be pretty interesting because if you've ever looked at the FlightAware app or website to see what planes are overhead, they filter out some of the more interesting stuff. So with my setup at home, I can see police helicopters if they're circling over something or circling overhead. I've also seen some really interesting military tankers over the Yuma test site with weird call signs like Skull 1 and Skull 2. No idea what that was about, but interesting nonetheless. You can also receive images directly from the space station. This is actually what pushed me to get further into radio. My local hackerspace had an event where we made a Yagi antenna with laser cut plywood and copper tape and used a cheap $5 SDR to pull an image directly off the space station. They do events like this maybe every couple months and they usually do like a whole weekend where they have like 10 or 12 images that they send out one after the other so you can try and receive them all. And I should say these are all images that I received and decoded myself. I'm pretty happy with these. There are also a lot of weather satellites that are up there that aren't encrypted and you can pull data off of them. This one in particular is an amazingly high-res digital geostationary satellite that gives a full disc view of the earth. There are also some older analog ones that will give you sort of swaths of the earth as they rotate as they go around. These can be a little bit trickier especially the geostationary one because it's a little further out, but it's a really amazing challenge and one I hope to be able to get into further. There's also a NOAA weather fax and this is for boats and airplanes out across the ocean that need to know what they're coming up on. This is all in HF and it allows you to decode an image of swells or high winds or stuff like that. This is also something that seems really cool that I'd like to try out myself. There's also a NOAA weather radio. Basically the entire US is covered with this with multiple stations and these are really great for say you're on a road trip and you're going to another state. You can just flip on one of these, see what the weather is like over there. They also give alerts for extreme weather. So this can be a really great resource for knowing what's going on in that realm. All right, and then I'd like to give a demo. So this is the antenna for the SDR. The actual SDR part is a relatively small USB device. This setup is about 10 steps. It's really not that difficult and all the software for it is free. So once we have it set up we can press play and we're receiving radio. Right here as you see sort of in the middle it says FM Broadcast. This is FM radio. I've found that with this setup this is actually one of the best sounding FM radios that I've used. You can also poke around and find air bands. In a moment I'll pull up some websites that will allow you to sort of sort through and figure out stuff local to you. But this whole swath of radio is pretty much airplanes up in the air. Airplanes talking to air traffic control can be very interesting to listen in on. I actually went to the airport to pick someone up a little while ago and it's really fun for me to just sort of drive through the airport and scan through and hear what's going on up in the air just above me. So we can come up to the ham radio band see if we can find anything good going on. It looks pretty quiet today. If we were seeing anything it would give a spike on this top blue line and then at the bottom we would see a varying colors. Oh there's something. Varying colors to show how intense the signal is. All right let's keep going up further see what else we can find. There's also marine band. The websites also have sort of marine band standard channels and then I think that within this space you can sort of just sort of go wherever you want as for point-to-point communication. It's also military air voice. Anything military U.S. government is pretty much going to be encrypted. So talking about legality for a second. Anything that's encrypted you cannot listen to. Decrypting it is illegal but anything out in the open in an FM analog or using a standard digital mode you can listen to that as much as you want. Let's see where else. Up here in the 70 centimeter ham band also looking pretty quiet. We are in a very RF noisy environment down here on the strip so it's going to be a lot harder to pick up things here than it would be say back at Tuscany where I'm staying or wherever you guys are from hopefully. In the five and six hundred well five to eight hundred megahertz range is a lot of police radio ambulance firefighters. I think there's a lot of hotel radio up here. You can poke around a little bit and sort of get an idea of where things are. Radio licenses like that for public service or for private stuff is all on the FCC website. You can actually search by location and figure out stuff that's around you that's transmitting figure out what mode they're in if you can listen to it. It's also pretty interesting. They give you tower locations how much power each transmitter is using. They give you a lot of information on that type of stuff. So here we can see a couple of transmitters. These look to be digital modes. They sort of just look like more intense noise and these require some digital decoding to get any voice or data out of. Using these SDRs there are plugins that you can use to decode digital data and the system that police normally use which is called P 25. You actually need two SDRs running at the same time and that's because they have one channel that basically all the radios communicate with and it tells them where in other frequency ranges that they should be talking. Sort of a command channel and then there's a big swath on either side that lets you actually is where the actual speaking happens. Looks like there's really not that much out there. So I can show you give you an idea of where to start if you are looking for stuff around you to listen to. So as I said radio reference is a really great resource. They have an enormous list of radio frequencies both current and past for pretty much anywhere. I've pulled up Las Vegas here and you can see it's a pretty big list. They usually break down by county or city and usually on this first page when you click on you'll get all the analog stuff. So if there's any police or stuff like that still on analog you'll see that here. Most places have moved completely to digital and if you actually you can see here that there is a communications council. So it seems like a sort of standard thing. Anyone within a county will set up a county wide radio system where it'll retransmit the relevant stuff to whatever repeaters are around there and so when you click on that you can see the frequencies that this is using and so this list is actually transmitter sites and the one in red is actually the control channel. So that's going to be a lot of digital data and then all of these other ones are where the voice is actually being transmitted. Some of these use this sort of distributed controlled system on analog and you can sort of bounce around between these and listen to what's going on but most of them are digital but this should have pretty much all public safety stuff in the entire county that you can listen to. You can also pull up hotel frequencies. This uses a very similar system. It has sort of different rooms for different uses and I would assume that the hotels are encrypting their stuff so you probably can't actually listen to it but it can be interesting to sort of bounce around. If you don't know what's going on in a frequency or where to look for stuff there's a lot of charts for where the radio waves are allocated. Some of it's amateur radio, military, you just really have to sort of dig in. What I've found is if I find some random transmission on SDR I just put in the frequency in Google and usually it'll bring up something. At least give you a start, put in an FCC, pull stuff up there, that sort of thing. There's actually a pretty good community on Reddit for SDR usage. A lot of these people are doing weather satellite stuff but it's also a decent place for asking for troubleshooting or seeing what issues other people are having. Finally, I found a decent bit of use on Wikipedia. It can be a little hard to navigate but sort of getting an idea of what radio services are called and then looking those up, reading through it, going down to the see also section. Can you lead you down some interesting rabbit holes as far as that goes? All right, I think that's about all I have. I have a couple of SDRs to give away so please find me afterwards if you're interested and tell me something interesting that you'd like to do with it. But that's all I have. Thank you.