 Well, good morning Las Vegas. It's great to be a winner and aren't we all? Well, we've had a few technical difficulties with this presentation this morning. First, my presentation was on an iron key. And Tuesday, it decided to eat itself. So there are a few glitches in the PowerPoint. So if you see them, try not to notice. Thank you. And yeah, this laptop has already blue screened on me twice this morning. So let's just keep our fingers crossed. Well, a bit about me. My name is Matt Crick. My voice is my passport. Verify me. I go by DC Flux. I was a teenage engineer. I'm a video editor and I like to live on the edge a bit and hang out on towers is a lot more fun than video editing at a console. And if I can't make people laugh during my talks, why am I bothering? So chapter one is going to get a lot of people's ruffle feathers ruffled because they are in love with their smartphones. But let me let me tell you why I named it this. This was because while I was putting these slides together, the Boy Scouts of America were doing their youth jamboree at our local Boy Scout camp. And one of the things you can get as a Boy Scout is the radio merit badge. So here I am explaining, trying to explain to a kid just about in junior high, you know, how cool radio is and all that. And he just sort of looks at me and yawns and pulls out one of these. Well jokes on him because the camp is located in a cellular dead zone with spotty coverage at best. But I was like, you little bastard. When I was your age, my computer at the time was a Commodore 64. The family's, not mine mind you, cell phone was this Panasonic bag phone here and couldn't find a battery for it. But that's what it looked like. Cost about between two and three dollars a minute just to use the thing and it made calls and nothing else. And the first, you know, if I wanted personal communications in the field, my first radio was the Yezoo FT-709. But, you know, so everyone, you know, got their smart phone so they can make phone calls. But guess what, an amateur radio, we've got that. We have manual phone patch and we have auto patch if you have a radio repeater. We've got push to talk, frequency modulated, amplitude modulation, digital modulation. Oh, a special note, I didn't put D star on this. I did not put D star on this slide because even though it's all kinds of fun and IP based, the audio quality is very lacking compared to P 25. Text messaging, we got it. We got Morris code, teletype packet, PSK. What else? We got picture mail. We got slow scan television or you can send your pictures with packet. We've got video chat, you know, full bandwidth, six megahertz wide, amateur television. And we've got like three different versions of digital amateur television going right now. And we've got location awareness. We've got APRS, which, you know, is basically the amateur version of low jack, but I don't run it anymore because I don't want the nerds knowing where I am. We've got internet access. On the 2.4 gigahertz band, channels one through six fall in the ham band. And that means as long as you don't exceed the bandwidth, you know, run like the full 22 megahertz wide on channel six and one, you can run up to 1500 watts using, you know, standard, you know, build amplifiers for standard off the shelf equipment on 5.7 gig channels 136 through 165 fall within the ham band. So about the only thing we don't have is an app store, but we don't really need one because the vast majority of software written for amateur radio use is free art is shareware. And the stuff that isn't is really affordable. But you know, we don't have an evil empire of profiteering glottons. Okay, quick show of hands. Who in here is paying $50 a month for their smartphone bill? I'll get to that. All right. So about half of you put that up. Who's paying $100? Okay, the number shrunk to about quarter of the room. But once you get your license and buy the equipment, there are no further bills required with amateur radio. My brother and I had gotten our licenses on the same day. And we were issued concurrent calls. Paul was KC seven GRZ and I was KC seven GSA. But because Paul was older, he got the dual bender. And as I said earlier, my first radio was an FT 709. So when I told my dad, I want a dual bender to like the FT 727. You know what I got? He came up with the two meter radio, the FT 209 and taped them together. That was my first dual bender. So I'm like, Oh, what the but later he would come up for me, the Kenwood TH 77. I love this radio to death. And I probably would be paralyzed right now if I didn't have it with me when I was hiking once because usually, well, this one's a little big, but usually when I'm out in the field, I'll put the radio on my back like that. But I fell off a cliff and used my TH 77 for landing gear. And the whole front panel was damaged. LCD cracked, battery scuffed. But you know what? I turned it on and it still worked and I could make a call for help. Try that with your iPhone. Okay, moving on to amateur radio. Now a lot of people, this slide was actually a quick comparison for commercial radio and television broadcasting. Well, you know, it's really a pain in the butt to get one of these going. It's like your lawyer fees. I just got charged $160 for a five minute phone call from this guy. And then the bill showed up because I was changing a license to my name from another guy's name. And it was about four, four grand, maybe a little more. Then you got your FCC fees, which is at least $500 per application. And then you got a fight for the right to get a license allocation, which you know, depending on the market and what you're going for is between $30,000 and $5 million, such as ones for the Vegas market, then you still got the equipment to buy. And depending on the size of your transmitter, it could be $5,000 to $1 million. And that doesn't include any of the studio equipment. Then there's like the mandated emergency alert system stuff that's going to add at least three grand to your price tag. Then we got your ASCAP, BMI and RIAA fees. Who would think that the people that write the music actually want to get paid for it? But anyways, Interham radio. You just have to pay for the exams and buy equipment. And a lot of people fear amateur radio operators because they think the guy with the 75 foot tall tower a mile down the road from them is interfering with their TV. When in fact it's the citizens band operator with the 16 pill amplifier running class C that lives behind them that gets into everything, including the toaster. And while we're on that note, citizens band is not amateur radio. While your smart C beer is doing something like this, our radios have that feature built in from the factory. And it always breaks my heart when I see a good radio gone bad. People beg and plead for me to repair their radios because apparently I am the only one in the tri-state area that knows how. But when I turned it on and it comes up on a CB channel, I get really mad. It immediately goes back to the person unrepaired or I will impound it saying I can't, you know, it can't be fixed anymore and I'd like it for parts. Such as the case with this poor, Heath Kit SB 200. This was butchered by some C beer to run the bias extra hard because he wanted, quote, more swang. Apparently that's some C beer turned that indicates to how far they can make their watt meter move. So, you know, we got up, we told the guy couldn't fix it anymore and we unmodified it. So it lives happily once again. Also FRS, GMRS, MERS, that's not amateur radio either. FRS, you're limited to power and it's basically a UHF version of CB radio. GMRS is a cheap way to get a commercial radio system going and I'm not even sure what MERS is. I didn't have time to look it up. So when you mention ham radio, people often associated with this stereotype of a bunch of fat guys sitting around that like to talk on the radio. Well, I won't lie to you, we've got that. But the hobby offers so much more as well. It's about teamwork on field day. It's getting people interested in the hobby. It's about learning how to solder and build electronics. It's about designing custom electronics for whatever application you may have. It's about volunteering. It's about putting up antennas and towers during the day. It's hanging out on a tower during a windstorm to install a Heliax connector. And sometimes you have to go up the tower at night. It's a series of tubes. Sometimes you can experiment and make those tubes glow right in your hand. It's some guys homemade arc welder. It's using thermite to weld. It's collecting electronics and various components and documentation in your bedroom. It's collecting equipment in your car. It's hiking up mountains for better range. It's talking through satellites in orbit for better range. It's disaster preparedness. It's being a trained weather spotter for the National Weather Service. It's volunteering during an actual disaster. It's an adventure that requires four-wheel drive to get to. And sometimes you need a black-hawk helicopter to get to it. Amateur radio can turn your girlfriend from this to this. Most of all, amateur radio is about the things that I didn't have time to show you, which you will just have to find out some of these on your own if you, you know, do take an interest. But don't take my word for it. Here are some of the hams that you people may already know. This is Jay K5Z Charlie. This is Bob K2AMH. This is Joe WB6ACU. This is Art W6OBB. This is Nolan W7DUK. This is John K2HEP. This is Steve WA6BND. This is Clifford K7TA. And this is Kevin N6NHG. Moving right along, the FCC is the man established by the government to be the entity that taxes people for the use of the electromagnetic spectrum, something that should otherwise be free. But anyways, these are the only people that have the authority to grant your license and to shut you down. Now, you don't know about the league. The Amateur Radio Relay League is Ham Radio's version of the NRA. They basically file legal petitions with the government on behalf of amateur radio operators and being a member gets you a free subscription to a magazine. I was going to say QST is like guns and ammo for hams. But surprisingly, that magazine wasn't owned by the NRA. And we've got some bands that we're allowed to use. You know, this is the HF radio spectrum, 160 meters through 10 meters. 60 meters there is one of our newest bands. And the thing there is we're not allowed to use that whole chunk there. That is actually channelized into five channels. And you're allowed upper side band voice only with 50 watts pep. But I'll tell you, it works excellent. The 50 watts on a 12 foot whip is enough to talk from here, Arizona to the surrounding states easy. Both day and night. Here's our higher bands 6 meters through 13 centimeters. What can I say we have and we've got more we've got places all over the place. You know, I didn't show you all of our microwave bands. But these are the most actively used ones because equipment's readily available and you don't have to fight with dish alignment. And what we're on that note, the narrower the bandwidth, your emission is, the longer you can make the range work. So at the top of this list is SSCW, which stands for super slow carrier wave. Now the trick there is the dits, it's Morris code, but the dits are 10 seconds long each and the does are 30 seconds long. But because they're that slow, you know, you need special equipment to decode it running five watts looks like 50,000 on the other end. Wi fi data here, you know, it depends on which mode data you run, they be one megahertz to 22 megahertz wide, which is why you might have trouble trying to make that work through a wall without antenna game. But yeah, oh, also FM phone here. Commercial handheld radios have gone from 16 kilohertz deviation down to eight. And I have seen 20 and 50 kilohertz FM phone on ham. But it isn't often because a lot of that equipment was left over from the first golden age. And I'll get to that slide here in a minute. But one of the nice things about amateur radio, you build your own mode. And you know, super slow analog data analog HDTV that worked. That was actually three cable television modulators on 57 58 and 59 combined ran through an amp and decoded on three VHS decks. But with all things, some restrictions do apply. You have to give your call sign at the beginning and end in every 10 minutes. You're not allowed to obscure the meaning of communications like, hey, I put that thing in that place for you that one time. No encryption unless you're commanding a satellite. No broadcasting. So that means that you have to talk to somebody unless it is a QST as in the case of amateur radio news line. No music unless it's part of a NASA rebroadcast. Of course, the last shuttle mission was a couple of weeks ago. So I kind of think that one's not really going to apply for a while. Oh, and you're not allowed to use the seven dirty words. But the swearing thing is also dependent on the moral standards of the community, such as the cases in the Los Angeles basin. But remember to give your call sign first if you want to test the waters. And if someone will report you to the FCC. So in short, don't be an ass head on amateur radio and you'll get along with it just fine. If you have to take your shenanigans down to CB where they belong. Here's the good stuff. 1500 watts pep on most bands with a few restrictions, like I said, 50 watts on 60 meters, which is easy out of a mobile radio. 200 watts pep on 30 meters. And also 30 meters is a CW only band and 50 watts pep on 70 centimeters, which is UHF in some locations. And that's a pave pause thing. And I'll get to that later. But the nice thing is you can run unlimited ERP. You can, like I said, build your own mode. They're allowed on all bands, except the pulse and spread spectrum ones are limited to pretty much 900 megahertz and above. Because of those are the bands that have a lot of bandwidth to them. And also, you know, unlimited, you know, as long as your mission falls within the amateur radio bands, you can have as much bandwidth as you want on 900 megahertz. What I talked about in the last slide was pep peak envelope power. That's the power leaving your transmitter terminals. And it's peak because sideband and AM, they don't function with a continuous carrier. And a good example of this is with AM TV. An AM TV signal will typically the average power is 75% typically below the peak power because of the sync tips for the horizontal sync. ERP, however, is effective radiated power, which is the power you can actually throw into the radio horizon after the feed line loss and the antenna gain. So you know, I've seen some people actually, this is notable because it was a Las Vegas television station that did it. They had a license for 2 million watts ERP. And they thought they were going to do it with a 10,000 watt transmitter and make everything up an antenna gain. And I couldn't find a donut to explain this. But the higher antenna gain you use the narrower the beam width. So if you use a very low and very low gain antenna, imagine the pattern leaving it looking something like a donut. But as you start to make that into like 10 or 20 DB gain, that donut starts flattening out into a pancake. Now, if you put a pancake on top of a mountain, your power will fly over everyone down below the mountain and land someplace 120 miles away. And that's just, you know, they're probably not trying to watch you but the poor guys that are five and 10 miles below under you are. Here's that chart I was telling you about the UHF power restrictions per 47 CFR 2.106 footnote US 7. Pretty much you'll see all of Arizona's covered most of Southern California, actually most of California too. And the Southern Nevada portion that Las Vegas resides in. But basically these are outlines around US government Air Force installations. And pretty much we share the UHF spectrum with, you know, the 70 centimeter spectrum with the government. And they use it for radar to look for space junk. So they don't like one of one of our repeaters starts getting to them and they get all excited thinking that, you know, this guy's repeater in his backyard is some space junk over by Mars. Estimated ranges. Okay, everyone, whenever I tell someone about how great amateur radio is, they was like, Well, what kind of range can I get? Well, a lot of it depends on the band and conditions. But here's kind of a chart I put together. And generally, the lower the frequency, the better range you can get because of path loss. The higher the frequencies, the more your radio waves actually get absorbed by buildings foliage. Some frequencies even get absorbed by the moisture in the air. But 160 meters is the 1.8 the two megahertz portion. And a lot of the people that are on this will run retired broadcast transmit AM broadcast transmitters. But the reason I put bad range on that is because you're combating with a lot of noise on 160 meters. Everything that has a switch mode power supply will make garbage, twisty lights, boat chargers. Yeah, I can get intense. 80 to 20 meters, which is our HF range, you know, generally, it works pretty good. Some bands work better at night. Other bands work better during the day. There's a it's a little big to put on this chart. Now 10 meters. 10 meters I put on here has a peak and a dip. Because that really gets good in 11 year cycles, excuse me, that are concurrent with the sun spot activity that's going on. And right now we were, we're still kind of in the null because for whatever reason, the sun hasn't decided to erupt again. So no one's really sure if that's a good thing or not. But during the peak of the sun spot cycle, I tell you, five watt handheld, you can talk to Florida from Arizona. And, you know, a mobile rig will talk to Japan from my driveway. VHF and UHF, which are the bands that are in these handhelds here. VHF penetrates a little bit better because the wavelength is longer. UHF tends to get absorbed a little bit better. And also this is dependent on your city and you know what you have skyscrapers and stuff. Now microwave, microwave you generally have to use dishes for because like I said, everything wants to absorb it. So generally we use that for point to point operations like linking between mountaintops. And yeah, if you have the right size dish, you can make a microwave signal go 150 miles. If you have the right two mountaintops and that is because of the curvature of the earth. We call that K factor. But at 150 miles, the dishes will actually be pointing into the horizon or you know, about five degrees below the horizon to get at the other dish because you know, their curve kind of like that. Okay, moving right along. So at one point in time, we did have five classes of operator. Number one novice I could have sworn the last novice on the planet was Walter Cronkite KB2 GSD. He was a novice for about 25 years, but lo and behold, our radio club just found one that wanted to upgrade. So they are still out there. Same with advanced, you most likely will run into people that are advanced simply because there isn't that much difference between advanced and extra. And you can't get it advanced anymore. So they're just kind of using that as a status symbol. So nowadays, we have very simple three classes of operator technician general and extra. Oh, and one more thing, there's no Morris code requirement anymore. So it's very easy to test and get your license. The requirement was dropped in 2007. The day after that was that happened was when I took went down, studied for three hours the night before and took my general. There were 34 people at that session. And we were at a paint store and I actually had to stand at a shelf in the back of the paint store to take it. And no one told me this. But I had used blue pen. And I circled the letters on the answer sheet. This is one of our grading templates. It was an almost an instant fail until the guy moved it and was like, Oh, you kind of did this wrong. I'm like, Well, you didn't you didn't tell me and you didn't give me a pencil. But anyways, so let's take a look at what's in the technician package. Well, you get all the privileges on six meters and up and you get some hf privileges. They're very limited. But hey, we'll take what we can get. You're limited to 200 watts pet power. But you know, the typical mobile radio does 100 watts. So you're fine there. CW only on 80 40 and 15 CW ready and data on 10 meters. And you do get SSB voice, upper sideband voice on 28 three to 28.5. So there's a lot of activity that'll happen on 28.4 because that's generally the one everyone congregates to. So if you take general, well, you get all the technician privileges, plus most of the hf privileges, except for a couple of small slivers that are reserved specifically for advanced and extra. And if you become a volunteer volunteer examiner, you get the ability to give technician tests. And I was kind of scratching my head about that, too. You know, you'd think you'd be allowed to give the general ones, but for some reason, they only give you technician. And if you get your extra, well, you get all that plus all the other frequency privileges, the ability to administer all be tests, and you're entitled to a class a our class B call sign. This is a class a call sign. Also, most states offer special hand plates. Check your local listings for this. Some states, they're free. Some states are discounted. Arizona kind of sucks. So you actually have to pay the same rate as a personal plate in Arizona. But you know, you get the little tower on the side and it looks so much cooler. And another thing I always get asked this a lot. People come up and they're like, what part of Pennsylvania are you from? Well, the number that's in a call sign represents what geographic location it was issued in. And the reason why I have a three in my call sign is because it is almost impossible to find a one by two or a two by one and seven land, because a large number of them were reserved for Hawaii and Alaska and people when the vanity program came out started getting them because I thought they were lucky. But anyways, also, American call signs only have one number in them. So right away, if you know someone, you can tell someone's not legitimate, such as the case of W six JJ or just right away because they'll have an when you ask them their call sign, they'll have an improperly formatted one. Okay. So who here recognizes these basic electronic symbols? Okay, but who of you know which one doesn't belong? I passed my novice without studying when I was bored at a Hamfest one time and I was 12. And I knew what, you know, a switch looked like on a schematic a resistor capacitor. So if you know anything about how to read a schematic for electronics, you get along just fine. But you know, if you're really interested on studying, go to this store. We are less than a mile from it. It's south. You can walk there if you can bear the Las Vegas summer heat or if you can find a taxi driver that will, you know, only take you there for a mile, go for it. But go in there, talk to a guy named Luke. He's the store manager. Very cool guy. And he'll show you these books. Okay, so they are a little pricey, but they are extremely well written and do a really good job going into theory. Plus, when you have your license, you can hand them down. AES typically has 25 of each type in stock at any given time. If you don't see a copy on the shelf, just ask and they'll find it. They also have the Gordon West study guides available there as well. And, you know, I know what you're saying, well, Mr. Flux, I don't want to spend too much money on this. Well, if you're willing to use DEFCON's network, we have free online resources. Oh, I will point out, though, that when taking the QRZ practice at practice exams, please remember to advance the test numbers, because it'll put you on test number one by default. And if you don't advance it, such as a case of Kimberley, KE7 PYL, she was like, oh, look, I'm getting 100%. I'm like, really? Advance it to test to 20. Because, you know, she kept learning the same 35 questions over and over again. This is the question pool size. So typically, when you take your technician and general 26, 26 right or better, passing grade is 75% or 74% or better. And I will point out that the general question pool has changed July 1st. So make sure you have the right question pool that you're studying for. So which class is right for you? General. General's right for everybody. I recommend everyone become at least a general, because you get privileges on all of the HF bands, minus those small segments, but that's fine. You just can't talk to Art Bell and PALS on 3840. And the segments reserved for advanced and extra, which, you know, it's 400 kilohertz based over what was it, 12 bands. So it's not that much. And it's real cheap to take the test via us. You know, save a little coin on, for the exam. This was the first year we actually started testing here at DEFCON. And there were actually a few more of us, but they had to go before this picture got taken. Let's see. Okay, so things that bring, obviously, $15. We'd like a photocopy of your driver's license, a photocopy of your existing FCC license, or you can print out the reference copy if you're going to upgrade to something like general or extra. We'd also like to have your FRN, which I believe is federal registration number, but I'm not sure on my alphabet soup today. If you don't have an FRN and you trust us, we can use your SSN. And calculator is optional, but it has to be an old school one that you improve to us that it doesn't have the test memorized in it. So, you know, a TI-36 would be just fine, but don't show up with a TI-84 unless you improve to me that the memory is 100% clear on it, okay? So can you do it? Well, you can. Ask kick by a blind man. This is my club's president, Bill, KD7MIA. He is legally blind from when an accident happened aboard the USS Enterprise. The engine on an F-14 Tomcat exploded in his face. And this was the day he passed his extra. And here he is on field day in a tent with blaring wind and we're giving volunteer examinations. And this one just happened. This is Karen Lee. She doesn't have her call yet because she just passed on Tuesday. She didn't have a lot. Here's the impressive thing. She didn't have a laptop or a computer with the internet, couldn't afford a book, and didn't ask anyone to print out the questions for her. So she studied on a droid. Yes, wouldn't you know that smartphones are actually good for something after all. And she actually took it the month previous, but the website she was studying on, I forget which one it was, but their mobile version did not have the current question pool. So she failed the first time, but came back and took it on Tuesday and passed with only two wrong. Okay, so everyone's thinking, okay, show me the hacks. Well, we are on the verge of the second golden age of amateur radio. The first one was the first commercial narrow banding in 1963. And that's when we went from 15 kilohertz FM deviation to five. So you got to love unfunded government mandates. So all the equipment that is made obsolete by mandates is worthless to everyone except hands. So, you know, you can get like four and $500 handheld radios, 20 bucks, 10 bucks, sometimes even free if you find the right guy. So, you know, pretty much we're going from the second narrow banding that takes effect, I believe it's February 2013. We're simple, we're going from five kilohertz to 2.5 kilohertz deviation. So you'd think that someone would just get in the radio and turn the pot down so it doesn't deviate as much, but no. The FCC says specifically that the radio has to be type accepted for that emission standard and no one wants to pay $15,000 to send the radio to the laboratory to prove that it's doing the emission they say it is. So as a result, you know, commercial radios are being dumped on eBay and Hamfest like crazy right now. So what do you need to work on radios? Well, I recommend you have at least one cat on your bench at all times because if you do your critter count goes down to practically nothing. Also the messier your bench is the more work you can get done. So what I have on my bench here, and this is kind of an old picture, to the left there I have an Astron VS 35M which is variable voltage, variable amperage power supply up to 35 amps. Very useful for working on almost any radio. Behind the cat there is my trusty HP 8924C. That is actually a CDMA cellular test set, but they built it on top of the 8920, so it still retains all of the analog functionality of the 8920, but the difference is that test set is 2000 versus 12,000 for a used 8920. So it weighs a ton, but by golly it works great. Above that is a Hewlett Packard. I believe it's 1634 logic analyzer. I believe it's got 48 inputs, but it might have a few more. But anyways, I picked that up for 50 bucks on eBay and it actually belonged to Connor Peripheral, so it even came with history. Also to the right of the cat is a Fluke 87. I'll tell you, spend the money now and buy a decent voltmeter, because these fly-by-night ones out of China, I've actually had this happen within the last month, because I don't like my good meter leaving the house, but I get up on the mountain, pull it out of my backpack, and the thing promptly fries itself in my hand. And what was impressive is I didn't even have it plugged into external voltage yet. And also you're not seeing this to the right, but I do have a Dell computer there, so if I need to look up a data sheet on something, I can just boom, pull it right up. Okay, oh, here's my Motorola card extraction tool used in insertion mode. Believe it or not, Motorola actually gets like $45 for the right tool that does this, and who would know that you'd have one sit right below your feet. Here's one of the hacks I did. Oh, also the hacks I have done do appear on the Defcon DVD in PDF form, so if you need instructions on how to convert something that I've converted to amateur, it's right there for you. This is a GE VHF Master 3, and what is awesome about this is when I wrote the article on how to convert it, they put it on repeater builder, and it appears right below an article that somebody wrote saying you can't convert these to run-and-hand band, but it's a little, this is the vast majority of the work, basically I just soldered brass acorn nuts onto the top of the tuning slug, so I could get a little more metal and make the helicals pull down to where I want them. Here's a board out of the UHF government band, very simple mod here, take the whole thing apart, and cut a quarter turn off each one of these helicals. Sometimes you have the other split though, 450 to 470, and those are two down okay, but if you want that extra one or two DB, you got to take it apart, and well this mod's real cheap because it only cost seven cents, but while you're in there be sure to be on the lookout for these damn things. Oh, 10 whiskers. The one on the right is actually a photo I took. They're about five-eighths to, or the one I took was about five-eighths to three-quarters of an inch long, and it almost looks like a scratch, it's so fine, but this thing is so fine, I had to stop breathing while I was taking the picture, because it was moving in the wind, and I was like two feet from it. Yeah, so what happens here is the whiskers, no one knows why they grow, not even NASA, but they'll grow and short out your stuff, and then you'll be like, well why ain't my stuff working? And I actually saw this on a mountaintop. The Master II, the drawer was folded open in the position, open position, and someone wrote on it in Sharpie, do not close, because as soon as you closed it, the whiskers came down and shorted out your helicals. The one of the most underutilized band in amateur radio right now is the 221 simply because there's only like one commercial manufacturer, AM radio manufacturer that makes radios that run on it, because apparently America is the only country that has a 220 amateur band, so everyone avoids it like the plague. You'll find radios that have the functionality in them, like the Quad and the Triple Bander, like the THF6A does 220, but so lately I've been a fire department graciously donated to our club about 50 of these things, and we're like, well great, they're on VHF, what are we gonna do with them? So I did some research and found out it was possible to make the thing run on 220, you know, it took me about three or four weeks worth of effort to do, but because it's a 45 megahertz IF radio, very simple, I just convinced the voltage control oscillator to run backwards, and I hacked the software to where it would program that far out of range. So the transmit frequency you program true, and the receive frequency you program 90 megahertz minus where you actually want it. Well, if you don't like GE, here's kind of the same thing I did in a Motorola Max Track. This one's a little more involved, because I had to take apart a bunch of the coils, and I got tired of fighting with the PA, so I just took the Dremel and cut a slot out and shoved a, that's actually a linear power brick in the center there that I stole out of a Amplitude Combanded Single Sideband 220 rig, and I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyways. And wouldn't you know it, the battery for this one ran dead sometime between Wednesday and Thursday, but anyways, I swear it works on 220, but this is the GE PCS handheld, so if you see in the photo here, I actually put brass screws and the receive tuning coils, and I did a little work changing coils on the power brick, simply because the one that might work on 220 is almost impossible to find anywhere. Here's some, yeah, I always ask people this, got any six meter duplexers? I do. I had to pick them up and have a friend drive up and get them, and they made a 800 mile trip and came down to me, and you know, they wouldn't really tune where I wanted them until I pulled the thing apart, and very simple, cut one turn off that coil and solder it back together and stretch it out. And there's been a fierce debate over crystal, old, can crystal controlled rigs, you know, which one's better, the Micor or the Master II? I like the Micor because the receiver is hot, but the Master II transmitter is just so good, ooh, it's tough. Anyways, the surplus market has a ton of these for hams that are, you know, just, they were practically already worthless to commercial users, but now they're really worthless, but they are crystal controlled and no one likes to spend $50 and wait two months for a set to grind. If only there was a solution. Well now there is, thanks to new technology from our friends at analog devices, we've created the virtual channel element Micor edition, and I'll tell you, when you can solder an LFCSP 24 by hand, you've reached max level. Okay, so moving on, we have the general incompetence section. Okay, we got this cable from a guy who got it from a guy who got it from another guy, who that actually worked at the place that manufactured it, but what you are seeing here is a homemade adapter from quarter inch Heliacs to a PL259 connector made from 12 gauge copper wire. Also, this is what happens when you are in a site that you are not allowed to have mouse decon at, because somebody made the Hualapai Mexican vole an endangered species. So the thing gets in your building and it likes to hang out on hotspots and crap all over your board and the problem is that stuff will eat right through the solder mask and start dissolving the copper. So, you know, such as the case of this radio, this radio jammed in transmit mode and the guy was asking me, okay, find where the interference is coming from and I'm like, dude, it's your own stuff, and sure enough he goes up there and the thing's transmitting. This is really good. This room was at a juvenile detention facility. They had a problem that every time lightning struck within a mile of the place, the door controllers would blow up. This room had the best indoor ground system I had ever seen with three eight-foot ground radials drilled through the foundation and double zero copper all throughout the baseboard. This lone polyphaser here is our, you know, lightning arrestor is the only thing connected to it. Also, I find it humorous because no antennas were connected to it at the time either, but yeah, they never even bothered to hook the antenna to it once they got the ground system. At first, this antenna looks at the top here, looks like it's pointing at Las Vegas. Look again. Too much stress on the tower when the antenna was a popsicle and the wind speed got high enough, ripped the top rungs right off the tower because it wasn't bolted low enough. Alright, I was scratching my head on this next picture and I'm sorry it's a little hard to see, but this is the KAAAM Tower, old, dark one in Kingman. For some reason, someone bolted cellular antennas at the 40-foot level, which it didn't make sense to me and I was scratching my head. I even called their chief engineer and he didn't know. So, you know, I didn't figure out why they did it until I went into the parking lot and this is what I saw across the street. Apparently, cellular coverage is so lousy in our town that they couldn't sell cell phones. And this is a site access gate and this is kind of a double-edged sword. Had it not been for the push bar on this front of this truck, it probably wouldn't grab the gate, but also had it not been there, this guy would have probably lost his junk. And on that note, it has occurred to me that we have ran out of time and so I can clear the stage for the next guy. I will be entertaining your questions in the Q&A room. Thank you for attending and enjoy yourselves the rest of the day.