 Welcome to the RF elements and license podcast. I'm Caleb. I'm here with Tossos. And today we're talking to Josh of Impotter has been in the industry for a really long time doing a lot of consulting work, a lot of different roles currently with this.net. So got a really interesting conversation queued up and we're ready to talk to him here in just a second. So soon as Tossos gives us our call to action for the good people out there. Absolutely. Don't forget to like, listen or subscribe to our channel right here on YouTube or anywhere you download your audio podcast like Google, Spotify or Apple. Josh, my man, thank you for taking the time to talk to us today on our humble little podcast. Really excited to hear about your experiences, your life. Maybe we've got time a little bit of grounding there. You're kind of passionate about that. And that's always a good time. Versational topic to get people worked up about. So yeah, man, just walk us through how you got to where you are today and let's roll with it. Awesome. Thanks for being here. It's quite an honor, really. Telling my story is hard without going way back, but I'll try to go quick in the way back. Depends how far way back we're going. The universe was invented. I'm like, all right, let's fast forward. So we had the big bang and then yeah, I'll go really quick there. I started programming in like in fifth grade. I got introduced. So that was my first introduction and then my parents got me a 386 computer. It was brand new with Windows 11. And I got on that and I started programming with that and I just loved it. So I kind of started with software development, actually. And then I went into networking. So kind of zooming forward to just past college. I did some college with computer networking stuff, but I didn't finish. I was kind of bored, honestly, with liberal arts education. I wanted a technical education and just wasn't the right school for me. I was going to go back, at least I thought I was, but I got married and had kids instead. But I jumped into working for a computer store that was also an ISP. They had a dial-up ISP. And that's where I really started getting deep into networking. And that's where my wireless journey began. We had dial-up. I knew dial-up wasn't going to be forever. We were in really rural area. The areas we served a few towns were like 300 or so people, some of them were 2,000. The capital, not capital, was it called the county seat. It was like 5,000, just a small, rural area like we all know. And I wanted to go be on dial-up. So I got a Cisco 802.11 wireless access point. I got the boss to buy it, really, is what I did. And I got some. Because it was $4,000 back then. Yeah. So I got some some gear and some Tupperware and some truck boxes and some long cables and researched all I could to figure out what all these DBS were and stuff like that. This is before Google. At least I think it was before Google. You maybe was running the Alta Vista time or something like that. I was using that and asked Jeeves as well, you know, like some old stuff. So I was on forums and this is actually how I kind of got popular. I was on forums and asking and answering questions. And I had my signature there with my email. And when I figured stuff out, I didn't want to just stop with receiving information I wanted to give back. So I just became really active in almost like in Facebook, but preface book, you know, in the forums. And then I turned into being active in Facebook as I went along. So let me hop in here real quick. So what forums were really popular, like the DSL reports sort of? I was just going to say that I was on that one. I don't remember all of them, honestly. It was a while ago. Yeah. I have the same thing. I'm like the sepia tones take over everything. And I'm like, I'm kind of fuzzy on the details. Yeah. Who is DSL reports? Definitely for me. And I don't think there was anything before that. So that was pretty much where everything was at. I was a moderator on I think it was everything T1 and everything T3. I think that was the name of those two forums and DSL reports. And there was a handful of other ones. I don't think that everything T1, if that was even the name is still around. But that was I spent a whole bunch of time. We had dial up stuff and I had to I within two weeks of entering the ISP, the guy hands me a box and he's like here. I'm like, OK, what is this? And he's like, it's a mux. He said, what's a mux? Said, I don't know. But the guy that left that you're replacing said we needed it. So that's how I got introduced to taking a multiplexer to take a T3 line down into T1 lines like I'm 20 years old. And here it's a mux. Fix it. I don't know how he had faith in me. I guess he's just like, you're my only hope or something. But that challenge, it drove me to think I can do anything I need to. I just got to find somebody to talk to to get a clue and manuals to read. And that's kind of how I I got my starts. So I had a passion for helping anybody that would help. I I tried for, I don't know, maybe four years or so. I tried to answer six questions a day that weren't answered yet and kind of in the rank of hardest that I could answer first. And it was just a personal game. It was like how I let steam off. So I would spend 30 minutes or an hour or something doing that. Sometimes I would mock up the problem on the bench and find the solution and send a config or something like that. That and I didn't know it, but that got my Google rank up. And this is a couple of years after the computer store. So I'm kind of skipping ahead quite a bit. But I found out I was the number one search result for a Wisp consultant. And I found that out a while after I was getting calls from India and Turkey and all over. And I'm like, OK, that's kind of weird. I don't mind. I love talking to people from all over the world. And I even got invited to weddings on the other side of the world. And it's awesome. Like the community and the way the Wisps get together and help one another goes international. And I just I absolutely love that. That's a big part of my passions. That's sort of how I got to be an influencer, I guess. And I started up that Wisp back in Michigan and the the boss wasn't hungry enough. So I actually went out and became my own computer store consultant. And I was trying to build something. It was really around the fact that I was making like $12 and 50 cents an hour. And I had a little family and I was like, I need something with more headroom. And he didn't seem to want to go there. So but this is background 2000. So that wasn't terrible income, but it wasn't enough for my family. So I went out and learned the real hard way how to get broke. Starting a business and I'm not greedy at all. So if anybody had a sad story, I helped them basically for free. And that most of the work I've done in like third world areas has been for free or near free. And I still do it. I still do it today. I do a lot of what do you call it? There's a term pro bono. A bono. Yeah. I do a lot of pro bono work just because I love seeing the industry grow and help. I like to teach and help people get past a point that they're they're at. And that's kind of how I got into grounding. So I'm grounding. I was working one of the ISP that I started sold to another ISP and he put together three different wisps helped start to those three. And then he hired me as an engineer to come in and get his system all running smoothly and be his network engineer. And I worked there for probably three or four years. It's on my LinkedIn. That'll be the truth if anybody cares on the duration there. But we had towers that were hit by lightning. And I was like, there's got to be a solution. I got friends that are master electricians and I got friends that that's a radio engineer and another friend that is his friend that goes to my church. Like so I'm pretty closely connected to him, but he goes around fixing AM and FM and UHF tower stations when they're having grounding issues at the big level internationally even. So I sat down with him. I'm like, here's my problem. How can I understand it? And I at first I came away kind of frustrated because I like that's too simple and it's like, we're already doing that. But when I started trying to really learn how to measure it and all these other things, I was like, we really aren't doing what the requirements are there. I thought we were, but he basically turned back and said it's it's grounding issue. And I'm like, how does I mean, these things are all grounded. So how is that again? How's that? How can that be the problem? So my sounds too simple, but my the big thing you got to know to keep your radios from taking a hit is that basically it's the input and output have to have the same ground level. And if they don't, if they're all different, then it's going to zap in between the two. That's the big issue. You got to think on your Ethernet input. You've got you're plugged into the power one way or another. It's being powered and on your radio, you're connected to the tower and the difference between your power ground and your tower ground. If there's any, it's going to fry that radio. That's what all boils down to a differential between the two potentials. Exactly. That's all it can be. So you have to have a nice big pipe between the two. And I'm a big one for saying, yeah, you need to have your ground rods into the earth because that's another system. You got your earth, you got your tower, you got your power. And if you can keep those all equalized quickly during a strike event, then you're going to survive. I mean, it's no guarantee. People always want to bring that up. There's no guarantee. Absolutely. There's no guarantee. You can have the best system and it can still be hit. But you can also have 40 towers and you can go five years without damage. And that's the that's difficult to do, but it's realistically possible. And I've helped a lot of wisps get there. Yeah. I mean, it's not as simple as you say. Either. Right. So, I mean, you know, I think everybody's response would be like, well, we did ground it, right? But their definition of ground is way different than, you know, what maybe, you know, actually has to be done, right? Because they just assume, well, I take a wire for the thing here. It says, this is the ground icon. Let me put a screw in there and a wire and just, well, this is metal, right? So we're grounded. And I think that's really what needs to be brought to the forefront and maybe better explained, which I know you've done many times, right? But to be put out there and what what a proper ground actually is. Yeah. Well, the tool to sit down and study. And I know people don't like to do that, but it's not that bad is the Motorola R 56 book. It's kind of the Bible of grounding. There's one chapter that you got to get. It's a big book, but it's online. It's on PDF. You can Google search it. You can also go to joshubin.com, that's J-O-S-H-A-V-N dot com. And there's a resources thing and you go down and you see there's grounding links. I got a page. I got a number of good free PDFs. There's nothing that you pay for on my website or something. I'm not promoting that. Just saying that I got the book there. There's also a whole other the first link. I'm trying to think of the guy's name, Mike Holt, I think. He's got a really good illustrated guide to basically doing customer side grounding properly. It's more oriented towards doing like satellite installs or something, but it's the same for wisps. And he's actually electrical. He's a trainer for electrical inspectors. So he's coming at it from the side of what the regulations require. And that's another big contested thing. And I say you absolutely do want to be grounding your customer side stuff. There are cable manufacturers that include like a carrier wire that's compliant for ground. So it's a copper wire that's on the outside of the ethernet cable. And you can connect that to the mast that the equipment is done. And then you connect that to your ground system outside the house. And so that connects the environment that the antenna is in. And then the foil on your cable connects the ground connection on your radio. And now the environment and the radio are both well connected to the same net ground wire. And the surge suppressor needs to connect to your electrical ground system outside your house, like your ground rod or your meter box or an intersystem bonding terminal. That wire is really not any more expensive than the way you're already running. The only extra effort or cost is that you got to get that ground wire near your meter. So you basically want to run from your antenna to near your power meter and then into the house. And sometimes that can be kind of wrapping around the house or over. Those get complicated, but life is complicated. You don't want to run a second ground rod because it's not just connecting your equipment to earth. That actually causes more problem than it fixes because you need your ground to be equal to your electrical ground, not just equal to earth. So that's why you wanted to the power meter. Yeah, there's resistance in the earth. So those two ground rods, you can literally go to a field and put a ground rod in, go a few hundred yards, put another ground rod in, run a wire between them and get them to spark in some cases with nothing around. Just because there's you created a lower resistance path than through the earth for a current to go through. And I'm not saying a big spark, but you know, if it's dark, you can see a little bit. And that's essentially what you're causing. If you're driving separate, dedicated rods that are not bonded back to the same system, because grounding is all about having everything at a zero point. That doesn't mean zero electrons. It means the same number of electrons, right? So, I mean, I've heard many debates on this on the, I guess it's on the tower or the CPE side, right? So some people say, well, it's better to have the grounding down at the ground, let's say, where your surge protector is, right, only. And some people say, well, you know, you should really you want the surge, sorry, to kind of exit the system as close to the device as possible. So really you want to ground the radio, you know, to a tower, a mast or whatever. And some people say, well, you need both or some people say you shouldn't. You should have one or the other. Is there any any sort of, you know, light that you can bring to that subject? Is there any, you know, basic methods that people should follow? Does it depend on certain things? Yeah, it's a it depends thing. If you want the cheap, easy solution that works pretty reliably, you can do all your grounding at the bottom and you ground your radio with the foil. I've done this on a lot of towers. If your radios aren't super expensive and you're not afraid to lose them in the event of a strike, then that's perfectly fine and you probably won't be losing them. If you want ideal, you want to ground like every foot, the shield of the cable or not foot, I'm sorry, every 50 foot. That's a lot of grounds. That's a lot of grounds. No, not ground every foot. So like, what's that cable called? It's a ethernet cable on the inside. And then there's another like copper heavy duty shield around it. Yeah, yeah, it was what Cambium was always recommended for years, usually full of gear and I hate it. But I hate it too, and I don't use it. But if you want like best and you're putting, you know, $10,000 plus radio up there, I wouldn't hesitate to use it. And you put a surge suppressor at the top and one at the bottom and ground that shield every 50 feet. And that keeps the outside of the cable, any energy, like if there's a strike going down the tower is creating a whole bunch of electromagnetic energy going out and it's going to go into that shield. And the quicker it can equalize to the tower, the better. And I'm not saying carry the current of the tower. But if there's a potential difference, then it wants to jump over to it. If it's the same voltage level, not current flow, but voltage level, then there's no potential and it won't jump. So you're not grounding isn't about taking all the current of a strike from one device to another device. It's saying that there's no reason for it to zap over and make that that static shock. So it is nice to have your equipment grounded at the top and bottom. The main difference that that can cause is when you're dealing with like an FM transmitter or something and 10 is get changed, whether you're grounding at one point or two points. You can also create current flows where energy wants to flow through it because maybe your the copper that's in your your cable is better than the painted old rusty tower. And so there's a lot of variables. You got to look at how good your bonds are at each point and copper is a better conductor about 10 times better than like galvanized metal. So but that is a helpful thing to know 10 times is about the number. You can look it up on charts. It's in the Motorola book, but you're you need 10 times the surface volume of like galvanized metal than you need for copper. So if you if your pole is 10 times bigger than the copper wire in your ethernet than they're equal, if it's more than 10 times, then that's the better conductor. And that gets into like, do I run a copper ground wire down the tower and a water tower? I wouldn't because there's so much steel there. And in a tower where there's a lot of corrosion and stuff like that, I would. It's never going to hurt you. It's just a cost factor. So you can just say I want to do it always. It's only now another $300 and I don't want to have customers out because I value the income more than 300 bucks. It's a great argument. So I can go either way on that. Water towers are a big one. A lot of water towers are not connected to the utility grid until you put your radios on them. And then I had one water tower down south in South Texas. I think half of the radios were coming up at gig. The other half, they would only come up about 100 meg. And within a month, they lost one of those radios and they went out and they replaced it and it was an ethernet. And so they changed their surge protectors and then they talked to some bender that sold them this chemical ground thing. They wanted them to put this plate or something in the ground and add these chemicals to it. And it was kind of expensive. And I said, don't even use it. I said, all you got to do is run a piece of ground wire from your utility grid right here. I went on site and I looked at it and they're like, no, no, no, that can't be it. They've not lost the radio and everything's working at a gig. It took me two pieces of copper that are about eight foot long. And that's been six years now that they haven't lost any equipment on it. And they lost, I think, three or four radios in the process of trying to figure out how to ground it. Yeah, you know, there's there's so many people that are like, oh, grounding is too complicated. There's too much dark magic like we'll never figure this out. And there's I mean, there's a twinge of that. There's an aspect of that sometimes, especially if you're in a situation where you've got some weird ground loops or you've got 20 different vendors on the different tower and everyone's got everything sort of, you know, piecemeal patch together. But for the most part, you know, there's a handful of simple things that you can do, you know, use a quality cable like don't go cheap on your tower cable. Use a good shielded cable that how many times you pull out a cable and it's a nice expensive shielded cable with a plastic end on it, right? No shield bond, no tide to that. I've seen so many times surge protectors. Oh, hey, we spent all this money on surge protectors, but they won't ground on the surge protectors, right? So at that point, it's just another path like not doing any good. So yeah, or, you know, using a $15 surge protector on a $5,000 radio. Well, you know, maybe the math doesn't really pan out on that, especially when you can get a high quality, you know, Alpu or Alpu fit or the lights or whatever you want for 50 bucks, 100 bucks or whatever it may be. I mean, there's a lot of really good options that are not that bad and you're going to burn that up with a tower climb cost anyway. So, you know, use quality surge protectors, get everything bonded as close as you can. Use good cables, use good ends. Your life is going to be significantly better. I think that's what burns up a lot of people. And it's always tough because you'll you'll, especially the newer whistle, they start up and, you know, they start getting things figured out, start generating revenue. And then about this time of year, their life gets very painful because all the stuff they've built off all fall and winter is now starting to get popped as we entered in the lightning season. So, you know, it's just one of these things where you learn a little bit the hard way sometimes. But, you know, this is something where a little bit of work in advance, a little bit of research and practice and talking to people can save you a lot of pain down the road for sure. The ubiquity tough cable, I'm not sure it's called the tough cable end, whatever that end is, that user guide is great. Um, use that to terminate to and everybody I've talked to about that, they're like, they don't want to do it that way. It's you got to fold the cable back or the foil back. The foil has a blue side. It's non-conductive. Get your multimeter and touch it and see. That's a Teflon coating. I believe it's Teflon could be wrong on that. But it's a it's a coating on there that's non-conductive. Only the inside is conductive, the shiny metal side. Um, you want to fold that back and you want it to be inserted into the inside of that. Um, so your foil connection to the RJ45 is really important. The, um, drain wire, the drain wire. Thank you. Um, that's not the ground wire. That's a drain wire. Um, and you do want to put that through the loop, but that's actually the more optional part. The foil is the primary, uh, ground point and there's ends that don't even have the drain wire loop on it. I like having both, um, but in grounding the point where you're, um, sorry, words escape me sometimes. The point of interconnection is the really important point and all of the surface area that you get in on the foil is good. And I've seen a lot of those ends where you crimp them with a pair of pliers or something like that. And you go back and you look at it and it's all corroded and it's just, it's not solid. And those corrosion points are where you're going to have failure, um, because you didn't get the equalization through it. It doesn't need to carry a bunch of current, but it does need to keep everything at the same potential. So yeah, you're absolutely right on that. Those termination points are, are critical. I mean, there's just all those little things are, Hey, yeah, I tied to the tower. Well, the tower's got about an inch and a half of pain on it, right? So day and day and again, uh, a lot of times you need to make sure that if you were renting space, especially from the established carrier, an American tower, SBA or one of those, you know, they, they've all got their own sort of rules too about where your bond points are and aggregating your bonds because they don't want 37 driving wires running up and down the tower. But they, it also comes with their probably maintaining their bond system a lot better too. So it's one of these things where they're like, I don't want to fool with all this. I'm like, dude, these rules were written in blood or, I don't know, radio blood that if radios could bleed, they'd be bleeding all over from getting blown up. So, you know, that's, yeah, capacitor juice, exact worst band name ever. So, but yeah, I mean, you know, these rules were, were built, uh, you know, from pain. And, you know, it's not like the, the vendors are out there trying to make all this money off this extra cable and these surge protectors and stuff like that. So, you know, I remember back in the day where it got big as the nano stations or I forget what it was, when it really got popular, people will start losing ports everywhere and couldn't figure it out. And we, we all learned back in the day the hard way about how to do some of those sort of stuff for sure. Yep. Any other, uh, cognizant points, you want to point out while, uh, about what we're talking about grounding here. Like we kind of branched off a bit, but I know this is something we get a lot of questions, especially this time of year. Like it seems like these questions start popping up a lot because they're like, oh, my stuff got blown up. And it's never, you know, in the middle of a day, one of the Tuesday, right? It's invariably like Saturday night, four a.m. And you've got to deal with that. So any more sort of hot ticket things you want to punch on the ground while we're here? I guess I could try to paint a good picture what I liked to see. Like if I was going to go check out an inspection, I want to open the tower box where the equipment's at. And I want to see a bus bar of some sort. You can get the little aluminum strip. There's got the green nuts that you can get from electrical supply. Aluminum and copper aren't really supposed to go together. Also copper and galvanized aren't supposed to go together. But if it's designed to go together, I think that's the purpose of the green screw that's on those bus bars, then it's going to be good. And the reason is you can get corrosion. So you want to be careful that you're, just talk to your electrical supply and they have like a bronze thing that will connect galvanized to copper. And so you want to just make sure that you're using the standards. Make sure all your equipment ground is connected to a ground. If you don't want to run a ground while you're up and down the tower, then I'm okay with that as long as you're not connecting to paint, like you said. But you can put a bus bar up top or just take each radio to the tower leg. If it's a run 45G or something, you can get the same ground connector that's for going to a galvanized pipe. Tower leg is a galvanized pipe. So use that pipe ground connector that the electricians use for building. So I'm perfectly fine with that part. And just connect your grounds properly. Make sure your tower is really well bonded to the bus bar that's in your equipment shack. Make sure it's well bonded to the ground rods and well bonded to the utility grid. You don't want the utility grid bond from your tower and those rods that are in the ground. Because if the pole gets struck, it's gonna spread out through the ground. It's just flowing like water and that's finding the lowest, easiest paths to the most ground. Your tower's got a bunch of ground rods around it because you wanted to ground it well. Well, if the best path between that pole and your tower ground is your equipment, it's gonna come through that path. You don't want that. Take a nice big copper wire and go from your power meters ground to your tower ground. Have an electrician upgrade it because the minimum code requirement is at number six. And that's not, that's enough to make human safe. It's not enough to make your radio safe. Take the same size ground wire that's coming in to your meter box and come out with the same size ground wire to go to your rods and your whole system. So it's usually a number two and that's probably a little smaller than my thumb but it's a big wire. It's worth it. It's probably only about 10 and copper prices are way higher than they used to be. Maybe it's 25 bucks to get that piece of wire and that could save your network. So just making sure you got those good points and you can say that everything's coming back to a good connection point. They're not a chintzy little linked a whole bunch of things screwed together with a small wire. The little pearly hue green wire that you see that comes with a bunch of these, you know? Yeah, probably wouldn't rely on my network health to rely on that janky piece of Chinese wire, but you know. The ones that you see in those memes on Facebook where there's a little Ziploc bag with the dirt and it's zip tied to it. Yeah, think of it like a road system. You want a freeway going between your tower and your utility grid. All your major systems need to be connected with freeways. And if you got freeways interconnected with the little alley, that alley is going to have a big traffic problem. And when that traffic is lightning, it's going to go all over. You can survive a strike on your tower, no problem. As long as you don't have your equipment hit like the bolt actually enters your equipment which will put a hole in it. I'm not talking about a little blackness around your ether network. I'm not talking about, you might not find the radio. Vaporize it? Yeah. Your deity of choice has said that the radio gets to go to radio heaven. So yeah. Exactly. Sometimes you can't avoid it, but yeah. If you're just getting black ethernet ports, then it's a problem that you've got it on balance. That's not a direct strike. I've seen holes in radios. I've seen, oh, I found this piece of the radio. It was about that big. You know, like that's a direct strike. So I guess just think of it like a freeway system. Get all your connections really good. Where you can, CAD weld, it's not that complicated. You can get the single units. Talk to somebody that does this. I know there's a number of people in the industry that do that. Tommy does a lot of it. He gets a lot of recommendations. But if you're doing it yourself and you're doing a single shot, it's like a little clay pot. It's got aluminum and rust, basically. It's an iron oxide in it. It's called thermite. When you get it hot enough to use a little wick, it's a metal, it's a magnesium wick. You light the magnesium, but you can't light the thermite. But when that goes liquid, it'll just turn into liquid metal. So you put that basically like on your ground rod. You put the wires into it and you get it hot and then you break the little pot off of it and you've got that welded. I think those shots are something like 12 bucks or something like that to get the single use. You can go bigger and you can get the clamp and the right gear that's more reusable and stuff and people that do it all the time, they'll have that. Those are expensive, but you know that something that's welded like that is never gonna get the screw a little bit loose and then not be making a good connection. And that will, bad connection will kill the whole system and you'll get, you'll lose your equipment. And a lot of lightning strikes aren't even a lightning strike. It's actually just energy. And then there's the ESD discharge. There was no bolt from the cloud. It's just you got energy built up into two different systems and they weren't well enough bonded and then the potential got high enough and pop. It's exactly when you like, when you walk across the carpet floor and then you touch somebody or something and it goes pop. That will take your radio out. Windy days, dry environments, plastic fiberglass type, radomes and stuff on antennas, just build up a static charge and just pop. Transient currents are induced from nearby strikes too. You're moving a lot of power. If all the strike was only like a quarter mile away. Well, guess what? You're still dealing with a non-trivial amount of power radiating through the year a bit. Yeah, that reminds me of another thing. Say you have a plastic radio and you got your ethernet cable there. Ethernet's grounded, the radio's grounded, but the radio backing is plastic. It's on a metal mount or something and that's not connected anything metal. And they're like, well, how could that be a grounding issue where you need to bond it? Well, Tossos just said it, static buildup from wind and stuff like that with these different materials. And then all of a sudden it gets up not a whole bunch of power, but it gets up 10,000, 12,000, 30,000 volts. And it just goes right over right through the plastic on your ethernet shield right into your ground unit and freezer radio. Just, and that's where one little piece of copper that goes to a little green screw that's on the mount, on the mast, and it won't be able to build up that current. So with that. I think another common misconception or something I hear people a lot too, they're like, well, the radio still powers up the ethernet didn't work. You couldn't have been lightning or a surge because, you know, the radio still powers on. And I don't think a lot of people understand how sensitive an ethernet phi is to voltage differentials because I mean, that's how it works, right? Like why aren't ethernet works by flagging around a little bit of voltage differential? So if it's looking for one volt or five or three, I forget what the base voltage and it flops back, but either way, if that turns into 30,000 and it just trickles a little pop across, it doesn't take much to deafen that thing out for sure. Yeah, I could be wrong on this, but I think I'm not. I think radios generally can handle about 2000 volts of a quick ESD discharge. I believe that KMBMs is tested for that. I don't know what ubiquities it's tested for, but I could be wrong on those very specifics. It's worth looking up, like go looking up. But the standard discharge, like walk across the carpet and discharge it, you can be 10,000 plus volts. So that's still way above the range of that 2000. You could be like climbing a fiberglass ladder or something like that and end up building that up yourself and touch and that could be enough to cause a problem. Yeah, it's crazy how many variables there are and when it comes to that as well, I mean, we're talking in voltages and tens of thousands of volts, but we're talking microamps or even picoamps worth of current. But you mentioned it quickly when you said duration, that's something that people don't think about either. I mean, it didn't occur to me until you mentioned it because I knew this, but I had forgotten about it. It also depends on how long that surged last. So there's a lot of things. It's not just, hey, this is good up to 50,000 volts, like you'll see on the spec sheets, 10,000 KVJs or whatever it is, but it's how long that last as well, you know, that it's crazy. A lot of stuff, a lot of stuff to know. Yeah, surge protectors are rated the same way. Surge protectors are also consumable items, you know, just, I think a lot of people don't understand that as, you know, a good one can take quite a few jolts and shunt over the ground, but eventually if it keeps taking it and keeps taking it, you're going to eventually burn the thing up. So all right, well, I think we've talked this one into the ground. Hi, that's a good one. All right, so let's get back to the history thing as we meander through this time. You were planning that, weren't you? You were planning that. No, no, I'm naturally. That came natural? That was my one actual insight for the whole conversation. I was like, no, he must have pre-planned that. He's like, I'm going to stay that. I'm not going to show you where I wrote it on this piece of paper, but all right. So you were, you're at the computer store. You'd started with us. You realized that you didn't have a lot of head room to grow because you're like, got to feed your family and stuff. So then you lost your own and was doing a lot of sort of similar things, but kind of where did it go from there? So I kind of went back into software development, which was my start along passion. I wrote something I was calling succulent and I kind of based it off of cacti because I was really frustrated with cacti trying to figure out how their templates work. It's trying to develop form. I even called a consultant that noted, I think it was Greg, I don't know how he says last time, so well. Yeah. I think I called him up, but I'm not sure as long time ago, but I think he listed that he was a cacti consultant. I had a conversation with him like, I don't really get how their templates are working. I want to do this and that. And he's like, well, what I'm good at doing is finding working examples and modifying them to work cause I kind of don't get it either. I don't want to bash him. I'm really saying, you know, I wrote something that sucked less than cacti and called it succulent cause cacti is a succulent. But I had big data problems. I was getting 13 million records a month into my system. I found some ubiquity bugs with it. I posted those on the ubiquity forum and they went away in later firmware versions. I don't know if that was because of my comments or they did it independently. I never heard back, but I started building that but I realized I couldn't release it. I put some posts out on the forums and people were like, where'd you get that information? I want that. I was like, hey, I could build a product here cause it seems to be wanted, but I needed to rebuild the data warehousing side of it so that I could handle the data. But I didn't really have time. And when I was running a computer store cause I was a wisp at this time, but before that, when I was running a computer store, I wrote a software to do billing and workflow management for a company that collected title information for people that were getting loans. Really it was for the title companies and they had a statewide operation and they were thinking about going national. They needed help with their business operating system stuff. So I wrote that forum and they needed another version and some updates to it and I was like, man, this is going to take full time for probably close to a year to reach the scope that you're talking about. And I'm not a great business guy. I didn't think about hiring it out or didn't know how to manage that. So I was like, not sure I could do that. I didn't like to say, no, I was trying to find a solution. I was talking to a friend of mine and he happened to be from Veritas software which I think at the time was the number three software company out there. And that was where he was. He left that and went into being a pastor and he says, I know how to build a company. So I started a boxy software with him and that's where I learned what real financial pain was. It took me a year to get that software written but we ran out of money and I ended up with credit card debt and we didn't get the customers on time. The software is still functioning but it's not got enough to pay my income or anything. So it's basically just kind of like keeping itself alive. And I don't know enough about the title market to really go and make it work well but I had also wrote a billing system for Wisps or started to got about probably a third of the way through it and that's when Sonar came out or at least that's when I noticed Sonar come out. And I said, I don't have the marketing energy to keep up with this. So I kind of like had all these financial burdens and these software projects and I was sort of like discouraged. Like I didn't know how to get off the ground and my partner knew big business, he didn't know startups. And so we were in process of getting some patents on some of our things that we were doing and stuff like that. And that's where some of the money went to. And anyways, that was a lesson learned hard and it taught me a lot about business and the portents. When you start up, you really need to get to cash flow positive right away. Whenever I talk to a Wisps wants startup like you got to get to cash flow positive right away. What's your plan? Can you do this in a month? Because I know you can't, I'll tell people that but you need to believe you can because it's gonna take you at least four times what you think it's gonna take you. So you got to have that runway that you're not in a desperate situation and end up with like $40,000 in credit card debt which is where I got to. One I kind of gave up on writing software because there's too much upfront investment to getting to the money. I went back into Wisp Consulting. That got me down to Texas here. I was in Michigan. I almost basically almost didn't leave the county. I was just like stuck where I was born. But I liked Texas. I mean, friends down here, there was a Wisp that needed some help and I helped him grow a lot bigger than he ever had gotten in a couple of months. He'd only got up to about 400 subs. He had some stiff competition. He had been in business quite a while but there was just a lot of things that he didn't know how to solve that luckily I had figured out how to solve along the way. And we got him up to about 2,000 subs before I kind of stopped working with him so over a couple of years. And I was enjoying learning about the business side of growth because the technical side part I had solved those problems and I could just offer the solution but there's also things like how do you scale your installers and train them well and on board them and how do you make sure your customer tickets are handled well and all that. But the ISP wasn't really, I've got a lot of passion and I felt like I wasn't gonna be able to do all that I wanted to do working for the ISP. A guy come along another one of those things where it didn't work out in the end but he had a relationship with AT&T and he wanted to make it so that we could like white label AT&T services for wisps and just allow wisps when they're up against an area where there's AT&T fiber they can not only use that to build out their own network but they can offer that as services to their people that they wanna manage the customer support for. And so I sat down with AT&T directors with them and everything was promised that there'd be margin. It turned out that there wasn't sufficient margin for us. That got me moved up to Plano but it turned out that I moved up to Plano and shut down all my consulting relationships that I had just built. I was out of debt again but I wasn't ahead yet. And then this thing that I thought we had all the T's crossed and the I's dotted and I thought, wow, we can really bring something of value to the Wisp industry. It just went like that and I'm jobless now and actually I took it really hard because I knew I could go back into consulting but I like, I don't know, three week long panic attack basically to the point where I couldn't taste in half of my mouth. I just didn't know what to do. One time I had a customer, had an outage, I laid on the bed, I put my hands over my eyes like this to get rid of all the light and I talked to my wife through fix an OSPF for a customer because I just couldn't even look at the screen. She's got a computer background. She's not a networking person but she's not totally unaware. That's actually a cute story. I met her at college and she was the one that was gonna train me on how to install the network for the dorms. She was gonna show me how to set up network cards and make sure they're getting on the domain and stuff like that. She didn't need to teach me anything but she thought I was kind of silly because I had a pouch of screwdriver. She just had a multi-chain screwdriver in her back pocket and I had a pouch with the Torx bits and everything else. So I was kind of that nerd but... Well, that was your mating plume-ish? Yeah, exactly, I have to say. That was him peacocking, you know? It worked. Look at all these bits. Yeah, it worked. So anyways, I was here in Plano and at the bottom, I knew I could pick things up but I didn't know where to go. I was like, do I wanna go talk to a vendor and see if one of my relationships would get me a job? Do I wanna go work for a Wisp? Do I wanna go into software development? I don't really have the money. Like all this stuff, I was talking with some other consultant saying maybe we'll go into consulting as a group because the problem that I had with consulting is if I had enough relationships to make my income stable, then that was fine as long as everybody didn't need me on the same day. And it happened all too often that I had to let people down in order to just like, I can only do this right now and you need me but he needs me and he came first and I don't like that, I don't like it at all. So I was trying to figure out how to partner with some consultants and it was just a big mess and it didn't make perfect sense to me and that's when I met Todd at Wisp. They had a CEO round table, Craig Oliver was a friend of mine, a Wisp that I talked to and he used Wisp and he said, hey, you gotta come to our weekly meeting and meet the CEO. And I'm like, yeah, another relationship that I could start not that there's anything wrong with it but it didn't seem like a solution but the more I met Todd, he's really a problem solver. He likes to know where things are and find the win-win in relationships and he likes to team build and he said, well, cause he saw that I was stressed and he's like, how about I just give you a regular consulting check and you can help my customers that are struggling to onboard get onboarded to my software. And I said, well, that's easy enough, let's try it. So then I got to the point where I wasn't worried about stability of my income, I didn't have but he covered about half of what I needed in one go. So that gave me some hope and then I started looking and I just, I understood the customer and the wisp really well and that's what they needed to improve what they're working on from a software development side. I would, I'd get on with their tech guys and a customer and say, okay, let's fix this MPLS issue together. And I trained up their tech guys on how to do MPLS and OSPF and all the stuff that has nothing to do with the this billing system but now they have people on staff that know how to track it down and figure it out because I had the process of you watch me and then I'll watch you and then you're able to do it. So I trained and created documents in the company and it's kind of worked up and we have a director's team and we don't have particular tops of anything. It's like we just work as a team together but I'm probably the most vocal of the group. So I've worked as high as I can in the company and I really like where I'm at right now. It solved my problem because I've got a real passion to build in the WISP industry, the solution that's needed out there. I grew up in areas where internet was hard to get. I understand that problem. I wanna find solutions for it. I know WISPs have the solutions. Wireless can get out there and I love helping WISPs build everywhere. And so how can I do that as a system that isn't me having? Like I've helped substantially over 200 WISPs solve problems and it's exhausting to have that many relationships. So I wanted something that's scaled and Todd's like, I want something that's scaled. Let's do it together. So I was like, let's do it. And I've been there, I don't know, three or four years and I kind of know all the areas in the company and I meet with customers all the time and it fills my passion to really help WISPs be successful. So that's my whole WISP story from beginning to end there. Yeah, it sounds like you've got a lot of experience, seem a lot of the good things and the bad, but you know, that's where the educational aspect comes from. So, you know, and speaking of education, one of the things that we try to do with this podcast especially for the newer WISPs or even the more established WISPs with these interviews is to say, hey, you know, where did you guys really learn? Where did you guys, where have you learned to like automate and make yourself work more efficiently? And one of the things that we think with like billing systems and stuff too, and a lot of people don't realize that, you know, a well-built, fully sort of integrated billing system is more than just sending out invoices and collecting bills and maybe even turning the counts down. So, you know, these systems especially, maybe 10 years ago, that's what it was. You know, your billing system was just a way to automate, you know, envelope stuffing, but now there's just so much more with traffic management and all these other things. So, you know, from WISPs perspective, they've gotten to be very popular over the last few years with the tool set that they offer. So, can you kind of go into that? Like what makes you guys stand out? How do you help a WISP be more efficient in their daily operations and help them grow beyond just a pure billing system aspect? Our secret sauce is actually pretty simple. We have our core values and we labeled it right to our name, WISP, Value, Integrity, Synergy and Passion, which train that through our whole staff. And we say, that's who we are, that's what we, like everybody, even the owners accountable to that. We create that with our customers, we create that with our vendor partners. We don't do anything that goes outside of those ropes. And so we have that foundational thing. It also frees us up to make decisions. So, if you get the first person you call when you call our call center, as long as they're acting within those parameters, they have the ability to help you. So, that's sort of like who we are as a person. Like if you think, if you wanted to pick this out of a crowd and we realize that the way we partner with our WISPs and we do consider it a partnership, we see ourselves as an extension of their team is we're helping them provision their clients to get the services that they're paying for. And we wanna, if that means teaching them how to use MicroTik to do this one thing, then we're okay with that. We don't administrate their networks for them. They need to administrate their networks, but we can show them models that work. And we're not afraid to invest in learning a new model or a new element to that because we learn it once, we document it, we train it a little around on our admins, and then we're able to offer that as help. We're not a consulting company. We don't wanna do that. We never wanna get into that business. And there's good reasons to have people do that. But we do know what it looks like to get into a data center and how that might solve your problems. And we're totally okay with talking with you about that if that's what you wanna do. And I just recently recommended somebody reaches out to IPA to talk to them about something I thought they were a good fit for. And we wanna hand off those more complicated things and we're not trying to get into that space because we only have a small team that's capable of answering those questions. But what our total focus is, is we're here for the success of our customers because if they don't add another customer, we can't grow our business bottom line either. So we have to add customers, but more importantly, we have to grow with, our customers have to grow. When we add a customer, it can take us a year or longer before we get any return on that because we have a big upfront investment. When they come over to us, we usually just ask them for the data, whatever form that data, then we figure it out and get it into our system. Then we get on calls with them and work out to make sure that is this properly all connected and everything like that? Now let's bench test it and we just have a lot of upfront investment in that conversion. So what really is best is if our customers grow up large, when we look at our growth, the biggest factor of growth is actually our customers growing. I guess we're just passionate about with success which that's why I work in the company really well because that's been my passion for a couple of decades now. Very cool, very cool. So you're pretty tapped in obviously. What do you think is the most exciting things going on in the Westworld in general right now about new tech, new market trends? You watch the news, it's very big and scary right now. Some people are a little hesitant and especially those that we knew a lot of people who started out in the industry and like 08 and they're like, oh, we're gonna have this whole global janky reception thing and everything else. So what are you looking forward to the most and what do you think are the biggest things that Wests, especially new Wests need to be on the lookout for? Exciting can go two ways and I think- Exciting good and exciting maybe not so good. Yeah, and I think government involvement is the exciting right now that's going on in the industry. I've got customers that are being overbuilt by government funded things that isn't really fair. That's exciting but not the good way. We got technology that's allowing us to get gigabit and your gigabit speeds to the home and that opens up suburban markets. What my expectation is that I think is gonna be a big change and this is kind of exciting to me and how this is gonna work is I think there's gonna be a breakdown in the core business structure of the service provider. It's hard to do well at all aspects. One aspect is sort of financing. Another aspect is your operations. Another aspect is like your sales and customer relations and it's hard to find a company who is just really good with sales and marketing and customer relations. Also really good at operating and also really good at handling their finances so they don't have any bank accounts standing in the way of growing. So that's what rattles around in my brain and how can I solve all these things and I do have some secret sauce solutions on our roadmap. I see myself like who I wanna be in the industry is Henry Ford. He made the assembly line and what that did is it made cars consistent so that now we have scalability of mechanics that know how to work on them. We have companies that know how to invest in it. We kind of have that whole solution together because we sort of simplified and systematized what it means to make own, fix and run cars. And I think the Wisp industry is, that's the big change that's gonna happen in the Wisp industry. Right now, picking up LTE, you gotta like learn things over it, yeah. Picking up a new market, maybe you wanna get government financing for a new market or something, you gotta learn a whole bunch of stuff over it, yeah. You wanna start building your towers yourself now. Oh my goodness, there's all kinds of stuff you gotta learn over again. This is really complicated and I think it can be a whole lot simpler. So I'm working towards systems that I think can revolutionize the market to where I'm talking at a global level we can really reach deep into Africa and India and deep into Indiana and Wyoming and like everywhere because the systems become simpler to operate. So that's my exciting passion. I don't know if that answers your question. Is that a good answer? No, no, for sure. The standardization of things, it's one of the biggest advantages and disadvantages I think in the industry because there's a very low barrier to entry. So you can get started very easily but if you take 10 different Wisp and that are at 10,000 customers and compare them, they've all gone things a completely different way and as you look at customer aggregation as they buy them up, there's just so much just hard to merge all these systems in, right? So if you've got the ability to standardize some of this then just got a lot of potential to do some really interesting things for sure. Software and automation, that's my answer right now. That's the direction we're going. Very interesting. Well, that covers most of the questions I've got and jotted down. I mean, we've covered a pretty wide breadth of information, but it was really interesting. So Tossos, you have any other topics you want to peruse through at this time? No, no, I think we copied, we've gone through all the different topics, so I'm good. Well, cool, cool. So Josh, people that are looking to find you, where are the best place that they can reach out and find you, get in touch with you or Wisp or all of the above? Yeah, I've got a unique first name, which means I could buy the dot com of it. So joshavin.com, it's a personal page. It's got some resources on there, it's got my cell phone number on there and email address. And Wisp.net is where the large, large majority of my focus is at. And even when somebody comes and says, hey, can you help me start a Wisp? I say I can, but really it has to be through Wisp.net. And that's not because I'm trying to force that, it's like I really don't have the capability to do that much work without my whole team helping me. So we do a fair number of startups, that's not our focus. I'm not trying to like attract all the startups, but we do work with startups all the time and I'm happy to have personal calls. And I'm happy to help get the team involved with getting people going. But when it comes to starting a Wisp, the biggest thing I say is like, you gotta understand the taco stand joke because it's very, very real. It is hard, it's gonna totally kick your butt and most people are gonna not succeed with it. So it needs to be that you really, really are committed to that before you wanna start. But we work with Wisp at all sizes. So that's the way that I can impact a lot of Wisp's now. And that's really the way that I work in the industry is through Wisp and making sure those solutions are fit for the market. All right, great. That was really good information. Tasos, where can the good people find us out there? You can find us everywhere on social media, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube is another great place. You can always email us at tasosorcalib at rfelements.com. So yeah, definitely find us on social media. If anyone's going to Wisp America, we will be there booth 509, so come find us. And otherwise, until we talk to everyone next time, y'all be good. Be good. Later. Thank you. See y'all.