 This is the talk where I talk about the badge. Oh, wait, that was the last talk. Sorry about that. No, I'm Ryan Serra. I'm Mike Zero Romeo Yankee Sierra. You'll see me drink a beer at strategic points on the stage just because it's a very emotional talk. And I happen to drink beer at my last EMF talk. So it's really interesting. I've been a licensed ham for a few years now. But my enjoyment of ham radio actually spend probably maybe 25 years. And it was 25 years ago that I was a budding kid. And I had a next door neighbor. His name was Chuck. And Chuck had so many antennas. And he had a fascinating wall, a beautiful wall of radios. And it was just amazing because I was a kid. I like these blinking lights. And that was just something so cool. And I thought, wow, you could talk to anybody. And strangely enough, I had these dual hobbies at the same time. And in 1986, you still had the requirements that you had to know Morse code. Oh, pardon me. I'm burping out. It's the beer. So this is terrible. But it's normal ham hijinks. So it's just, you know, actually quick question. How many of you in the audience have an amateur radio license? Oh, geez, wow. Okay, so this is fantastic. It's wonderful to be amongst all of you. And I'm hoping that you had a wonderful time here at the conference. Now, this is talking about rebooting the hobby. So for a moment, well, let's go back to 1973. And look, here are some wonderful people that are probably around our age today. What we have here is you have two dead people. You have Paul Homer, G4BXT on the left. He's doing some Morse code in a field that would be very similar to the field just up the way. Then in the middle, we have Roger Kennedy, G3YRO. And he's having a good time with a portable radio, obviously very, very portable. And then at the very end, we also have another silent key, Brian Potter, G3ZQX. Oh, sorry, ZQX. It's my septic accent, getting in the way. And during that time, you see 73 because these photos were taken circa 1973. I think of 73, so most of you in amateur radio, you know that as a nomenclature, as a Morse code shorthand, short script for best regards. It's not 88, it's not love and kisses, but it's 73, it's best regards. And you might almost think that maybe 1973 was the height of classic amateur radio because we had all of the surplus from World War II at our fingertips, so we could actually take those radios and start tinkering and play with them. And it was a wonderful time because you could actually get very excited and make connections with cultures that you would never be exposed to. But you know what? It's a little bit different. It's a little bit different now because, well, we have access to a lot of different tools and mechanisms and things to tinker about. And you know what? The statistics actually show that young people are not so interested in amateur radio. So you look at the statistic, you see 410 people signing up and getting licensed for amateur radio in 2011. And just last year, it's only 234 people. And that's quite sad because I know many of you that have the amateur radio license, you love it because the idea is this was a venue. This was an opportunity. This was an idea to be able to say, ah, I have a desire to be able to tinker, to play with, to explore, and to understand this technological world that I don't quite understand on my own. And so we have all these choices, choices. Well, if people want to do that, which is what the original RSGB survey was, why are you interested in amateur radio? We wanna know technical things. Well, where did those people go? Well, if you're a new technologist, typically, if it was 1973, you had one option. You would go to your radio club or maybe you would sneak into some electrical engineering courses at the local university, but really that was your own path. So now, if you want to get your information fixed or you want to get your tools, you can't go to Tandy or Radio Shack anymore because those venues are closed down. You can't go to those radio repair places because those don't exist anymore. So the idea is that you get your fix on the internet. And the internet, it's a dual, it's a double edged sword. It has so much information, but it also has so much information kind of in isolation without even touching the radio. And also, the idea is that if you want to play with connectivity, if you want to play with innovation, if you want to reach out into the world, what is your, what is the lowest hanging fruit? What is the easiest method possible? Well, that's really just using the internet. So people kind of go, well, yeah, you know what? I'm just gonna use my Zigbee or whatever and I'm going to have a load of library using MicroPython and I will have my EMF badge that can reach out into the world and everything's perfectly fine. And you know what? If I wanted to actually meet with people, if I wanted to connect with them, I would just go, oh, I'm going to sign up for a hackspace. I'm going to go to a meetup. I'm gonna go to EMF camp. I'm going to go to all of these workshops. I don't necessarily need to go to my local amateur radio club. And you know, it ends up being, if I'm technologically curious and I want to make some brilliant things, well, maybe oftentimes the whole world of software is more meaningful for us than maybe a little bit of burnt hands or the expense of actually having to build these circuits themselves. So it ends up being, and how many of you know this guy with a handout? Yes? Those of you that don't know, this is Dave Jones. And he's a... Most annoying voice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I can do, I can do, probably impersonate his annoying voice. He goes, he actually, in his last EEV blog before he got his knee surgery, he used his annoying voice and he answered the question, you know, why don't you get your amateur radio voice? And I can't do, I can't really do an Aussie voice, but he said, oh, I don't know, I get this question quite constantly. Am I going to get one, an amateur radio license? And the answer is probably no, because I don't necessarily like the idea just to say I've got it, you know, just like a trophy thing. I don't have the time, inclination, I use it probably, but I don't know. If anyone can convince me otherwise, oh yeah, maybe I should do it, I should get my license. Maybe you should, maybe can you choose your call sign? The K2 EEV, perhaps? Hmm. So hopefully that was an adequate approximation of Dave Jones, but the idea is that what is his excuse to use amateur radio when he has access to all of this hardware, all of this communication? And you know what? Maybe good enough is good enough. And the idea is also the follow the path to release resistance, or following the path of most interesting, because the idea is that amateur radio to some of us that are still joining is that there are very interesting things. How many of you went to the Dave Roundtree tracking satellites presentation? Yeah, that was cool. That was quite amazing to actually see him on stage saying, here's an antenna that I built, let's have some volunteers up, and let's actually track a satellite that's going over our heads. That's kind of crazy. The idea that we have awareness of all these things that are going around us and that we can actually talk to them, that's a very powerful thing. That makes it interesting. And that's what's interesting about amateur radio is not that, oh, you know, there's so many other things that can duplicate it. It's that we can do things that are probably a little bit unique. And so, okay, so I talk about kind of the old world of amateur radio, but I also want to say how on a hackspace, which I was very involved with, how we actually were able to kind of bring people into the hobby and how we did it. What we actually did was we said, okay, hey everybody, people want to learn to solder, for example. So what we did was we said, okay, we're not going to be anti-internets. We're not going to do all that. So we actually speak to everyone. We actually have a very, very busy IRC channel and some of these other things. And we say, okay, let's talk about some of these things because you know what? For a long time, amateur radio was the hobby of very lonely anti-social people. And what I mean by that was the idea is you would build your radio, you'd use some intellect to do that, but you would want to reach out and actually speak with people because ultimately we're social people. So you do that, you speak, and if you've ever felt uncomfortable, you could just turn the radio off. It was a perfect way out for people that might have been a little bit shy or a little bit less prone to talking to people. And so now that desire to kind of speak or broadcast out, that kind of desire, that kind of desire to be connected, that's almost being satisfied with Facebook, with Twitter, some of these other things. So now it's almost like we've kind of milled down the rice to get the essence of the protein, which is the people that are very interested in the experimentation part of the hobby. So what we wanted to do is we also wanted to make it relevant to people. People wanted to do, okay, I'm a person who has never soldered in my life but I don't know where to start. This is actually an excuse to be able to do that. So using the first license, the foundation license, we were able to get these people that were already technically literate very up to speed, very, very quickly, doing your practicals test, having an exercise of making contacts over the air and then getting doing the exam at the very end. That was perfectly fine. We did very, very well on the foundation course. When we went to the intermediate course though, what we ended up doing is we ended up kind of experiencing this notion of kind of a hackathon. It was a physical hackathon where we had stations and we were all building these different parts of the practical together. So those of you that do not have the British license, the intermediate license, which is the second license, you actually have to do hands-on things. So fitting a plug, soldering circuits, having some literacy of what the circuits are about, having understanding of safety and basically being able to understand kind of the relevance of radio into the real world. So what we did was we kind of said, all right, here are all the things that relate to the real world, which is basically doing soldering, connecting, and doing all these different things, and this is how you'd actually apply it to amateur radio, which is what we did, and we actually did it very well. But another huge thing is that all of us involved in the education of the trainees, we didn't bring in the cultural hang-ups that have existed, I think for a long time, because any nerd culture will have their prejudices and their ideas, and they'll kind of say, well, you know, I know Morse code because that's the original digital protocol, and so I'm better because of this, or I spent all this money on this radio and that whatnot. We worked really hard to actually remove that prejudice, and in fact, there are a couple of legacy aspects where people actually took great offense at this, there's the notion of, and I mentioned Morse code, there used to be these things like F-B-O-M, that's short for fine business, old man, and people kind of go, well, why does it have to be old man? And then when you would refer to women, you would refer to them as YLs, young ladies, and you kind of go, well, is this necessarily inviting, and I didn't bring up the statistic, but it was something like 98% men and 2% women in terms of being already existing in the hobby. So we wanted to get rid of that, and we kind of wanted to wash that clean, and so this is where we actually started out, and we said, look, this is a very open kind of a safe place. Now, this is not like overly PC or super, super PC, it's super, super PC, but the idea was that, hey, if we can kind of get rid of stuff that's kind of admired in the past, the idea of this radio that got inadvertently bolted to my hip, it's a very cheap 20 quid Chinese radio. Those of you that are amateur radio people, how many of you have a cheap radio like this? Yeah, so there are many, many people. There is a culture of kind of old-school hams that kind of feel, well, I used a term that was probably a bit crass in my other EMF talk, so go ahead and look that up if you want, but the idea is that they had, they took Umbridge at the notion that new hams can get involved in the hobby for so cheap. It makes me want to drink. So yeah, and you know what, in fact, actually, this whole impedance mismatch actually kind of goes the other way too, where we had somebody who, I'll call her Mabel Grebel, and Mabel Grebel was, she was very angry that we were kind of an unconventional hamshop. I mean, she was like, ah, where are the guys? I want to be trained, and she would just say, ah, ah, and you know, the thing is, these spelling errors are hers, they, I don't spell pizza as pizza, but the idea is that, you know what, this is a cultural shift, and we're having to realize that, you know what, we're going to live in a world where the internet will augment our experience, it's not going to be separate from that. And so this is, maybe it's good for the new kids, but, oh, oh, J.J., someone's calling for you on the radio. So, yes, sorry, that's preserved for all times on the stream. So the idea is that, you know, in continuing on with that, we actually, we did really well, like we actually got the 2015 RSGB Club of the Year, we were so proud of that, because we worked really hard, and we got a little award, and we tweeted about that, and we were saying, hey, we're all cool, cool, cool, but because we are so young in terms of presenting and dealing with that, that we actually had, you know, other lives to attend to, and so we weren't able to actually dedicate that rigor and consistency in order to actually keep people licensed, but had we actually had that consistency, we probably would have had 100 new licensees in the year, and that's just one club. And, you know, this is London Hackspace, this is London, so it's not necessarily people that have easy access to fields and hills and be able to speak quite a bit. It was just people that wanted to understand about technology and say, ah, well, let's see what we can do with that. So the idea also was, oh, everybody's talking to each other, so, sorry about that. Yeah, the idea was that we wanted to be able to make it a shared resource and actually be able to explore. So we actually took a disused cell phone comms check from the roof of the building at London Hackspace, and we turned it into a radio room that was available to us at 24 hours a day. So if we were all living in luxurious shoe boxes in London somewhere, we would actually have somewhere to go and have a nice beer and also be able to potentially make contacts. And actually, the idea of building antennas, building infrastructure, understanding how things fit together, it's actually been a really good experience for me in terms of my technical literacy. I think that I would say that for everyone else that's been involved, that it's also gotten licensed up, it's the idea of being able to say, hey, I can build this, I built this, and I can make this better. And so that's what, it's been quite significant. But you know what, also, I propose some ideas that are actually probably a little bit upsetting to classical amateur radio groups because this is old economy, Stephen, he comes from the 80s, he never had it, he never had a tough situation. But the idea is that we need to change a little bit, we need to evolve our ways of being able to do training and examinations. And the RSGB has actually done a really good job in removing some of the artificial encumbrances in terms of dates for certain types of exams. So you used to be able to only do the full radio license six times a year, and that was a little bit, that was a bit constraining because some people couldn't do that, they just removed that very recently. But you know, there might be an opportunity to actually evolve that into a venue where maybe we use computer-based training, maybe we actually can figure out a way that kind of gives us a little bit of gratification and doesn't necessarily denigrate the institution of amateur radio but rewards people on their technical literacy that they might have already acquired outside of the amateur radio world. And that's one of the wonderful things that we've had at London Hackspace is because people have this innate understanding of a lot about technology and electronics they don't need to be trained over and over again on the stuff that they already know. And you know, I think one of the huge things, and this is actually quite heartbreaking to me, is that these amateur radio clubs have resources, have people with technical literacy, have an understanding, but they can't seem to get new people to come and join and participate. And the reason why that is is because they don't know, people don't equate to amateur radio with tinkering and electronics curiosity and being able to do some of these amazing things. And there's also kind of the heartbreak of somebody who says, I wanna learn Arduino, I wanna learn Arduino, and they go in and it's just a bunch of old guys who just want to do rag-chew because they, sorry, rag-chew is a ham term, I should dispose of the term. A rag-chew is basically conversing on and on and on. The idea is that they learned their technological literacy, but they don't necessarily want to pass it on to others. And those amateur radio clubs will die alongside those members. It's a little bit sad because, hey, it would be wonderful to have the actual hobby exist, but the hobby has to change. And it has to change into radio experimentation. It has to be more relevant into the world of Raspberry Pi's, Arduino's, and hackable badges. So this is very interesting. So the idea of being able to leverage amateur radio to do some more appealing things, to be able to say, ah, okay, we can take advantage of the 2.4 gigahertz allocation and be able to extend that value and that interest from those things like ZigBee and be able to extend and do really cool stuff. And I think one of the really bright spots that we have here is, you know, we were talking about, I mentioned earlier, the idea of the people that were living in a software-only world. And these people are doing wonderful, brilliant, beautiful things in their software-only existence. I'm sure they might have something to show for it graphically or something like that, but the idea is that now we have enough interesting hardware that we can actually do software-defined radio. And for IT people who are so used to software-defined networking and software-defined this and software-defined that, when I told them, ah, the really exciting thing in my hobby is software-defined radio, they all kind of ground. But the idea of being able to buy a device that is multi-purpose and really can do anything, this is really, really cool. And you can get started for, you know, under $20. So this is absolutely, I wouldn't say that it's a game changer, but it's something that actually brings more relevance actually into the hobby. Because if we don't make things accessible and relevant to those that are out there, we're not going to be in quite a good situation. Yes, how many of you know about WebSDR? That's a huge, huge thing. I mean, to be able to understand how the radio waves actually show up on your screen, you can click around and do that. For those of you that don't know about WebSDR, you can go to WebSDR.org and just click in various different reasons. And you can actually tune in to radio waves, radio stations, and just various signals completely on your browser. You can do it on your phone if you wanted to. And the idea of being able to see those radio waves to experience that, that is something that's very, very new that never existed, you know, 10 years ago for the common person. But now it's available, it's easily accessible, it's something that we can actually do and play with, and it's something that's just enough, just interesting enough to go, okay, well, I understand how to receive this information, maybe I want to start interacting. So it's the device on the top that just does receiving only, but the HackRF, which the author is actually here at EMF, I don't know if he's left or not, but you can actually do receiving and transmitting. So if you wanted to spoof a Wi-Fi signal and if you wanted to experiment with that on the handbands, you could do that, or you could start playing and exploring that. So there's so much interesting exploration to be had, it's just that we don't know what we don't know. So this is the idea of being able to bring it back and bring it more exciting. And, you know, I think that actually in the future, you know, one of the things is Dave Rountree spoke about, you know, his demonstration of the satellites, and people were asking about, you know, the amateur satellites that exist today are not in a geostationary orbit, so you always have to follow them and explore them, but there are actually amateurs that are sending out geostationary satellites now, too. So the idea of being able to have a satellite that's right above there and do some pretty amazing stuff that, you know, huge, huge companies with lots and lots of capital were only able to do years prior, this is kind of the empowerment, the idea of using technology to be able to do some cool stuff. So I think that, and this is an Oscar satellite, Oscar 7 operating mode B, I imagine, but this is a satellite that has been around since the 70s, it's still up there, it's still working, and you know what, there might be an opportunity for you to be able to say, okay, I wanna build something out, I want to make something interesting, and I want to say, ah, maybe I can change the world, and maybe amateur radio is possible for that. In the world that we live in, where the internet is paid for and controlled and regulated, the airwaves are ours, and for us to be able to claim those airwaves as our own, we have to exercise that right, and so if we don't exercise that right, if we don't have our license and actually play with that, then we might actually lose that, and we don't wanna lose that, because we always hear about the government putting on more controls and more controls, so we need to reboot this, and we need to reclaim the airwaves before some other entity does on our behalf, so if you feel, I know many of you are hams in the audience already, I know that many of you that have been hams probably understand some of the challenges that we have as amateurs, knowing that the great majority of the licensees are growing old and will die out, what do we do with that responsibility that's been passed on to us while we need to reinvigorate the hobby? These are some of those ideas, and if you have any other ideas, I'd love to hear from it, I will turn the radio back up a little bit if you have any suggestions. If you have any resources, and if you want some resources, you can take a look at this, I can tweet out the links. One of the great ways of exploiting stereotypes is having a little bit of a laugh. If you want to laugh a little bit and cringe and cry a little bit, I recommend the Silent Key podcast, but there's a lot of fun to be had still, and we're in kind of an interesting time. We're in the new normal, and so the future's bright, but it's interesting to see where we've come from. Does anybody have any questions? All right, so I'll bring it around so you don't actually have to call in if you don't want to. Thank you very much, very interesting. I got my call sign in 1961, I believe, I'm Gore of Three Oscar Victor Hotel. Now, lots of my friends got amateur call signs then, and you've gone over many ways that the hobby is fantastic now, I love SDR and satellites and stuff like that, but can you explain why when I go to my hack space in Leicester, I say I'm doing an amateur radio competition, I can't come tomorrow, and they look at me like I've crawled from under, you know, I'm an alien from another planet. Where's the publicity gone wrong? Because there weren't all those outlets when I was 14 and got my amateur radio license, but everybody I knew was into amateur radio. Now, they don't even know what I'm talking about. So I know we shouldn't look back, but maybe we need to look back to look forward because there's so many opportunities. Where's the publicity gone wrong? Yeah, I think the fact is that historically we had this excitement of wow, I meet so many contacts in a certain amount of time, this is the amount of kilometers that I've hit, I think that there's a little bit of unfascination with what is abroad because now that we live in a instant gratification society, global society, there's really nothing that's kind of exotic or impressive. I mean, if someone says, ah, I went to a Korean Lebanese Italian fusion restaurant, maybe 10 years ago, people would go, wow, that's kind of cool, but now we live in a world of hyper-multiculturalism, so the idea of doing contesting, while it's really exciting and you can rack up a point and you can say, wow, Mike's signal did an aggregate, I went around the globe three times with my messaging, people kind of go, well, so what? I think the idea might also be, is the tweaking of the message saying, look, I didn't use any internet, I didn't use any connection, and I was able to still pump out all of this information using 10 watts or something like that, so you have to, you almost have to change the way that you're presenting it, and some people will get it, some people won't. It's a challenge because that, you combine this hyper-multiculturalism with the instant connectivity of the internet, the idea that the phone call locally is the same cost as a phone call globally, you have to bridge the gap and sometimes people think in kind of unsympathetic terms because they want that lowest hanging fruit, so it is a marketing issue, it's a branding issue of how do we compel, but the way that I would say that we would change that would be basically, to describe it, basically as a battle between the elements of the earth, and we're actually dealing with coronal mass ejections and we have to deal with solar weather reports, and you have to point some of these other things out that are just kind of, they're nerdy and esoteric, but they're all kind of like, what do you mean by that? Solar weather reports, I've never heard about that, and then you can talk about the Monder Medium and other things that drive me to drink, so I think that we just have to tweak it a little bit to the more exotic that they have to think a little bit about it. They have to go, ah, okay, you have to make a little bit of effort to get your signal over to Indonesia, not that it's not difficult to contact Indonesia now because we have so many redundant means of communication that way. Another? Okay, one more question. Oh, only one. Damn, in that case, I'm better getting my slight rebuttal into that as well. One of the points that I found when I started looking at amateur radio stuff was whenever people, for instance, at the Hack Space, said, oh, I was playing around with this SDR and I managed to do this, or I'm using Powerland Ethernet over Power and the local radio people jumped down the throat and it's like, no, no, you shouldn't be doing that, and I think that's possibly part of where the publicity's gone wrong, is that the first instinct of a radio person is get out of our airways. Yeah. But my, I've lost my question. I did have a question, but I'm afraid it's gone. Sorry, can we sneak in another question? Uh-oh, G4GRS is over there. All right, I'm just gonna get one behind. I'm gonna make it short. Yeah, I still haven't heard you talk from last year, so whatever, I got licensed in 1976 and I'm gonna, there's always been a boring old fart element in amateur radio. There always was, there always will be people who know so much better than, you know, they've got their little niche, their little clique and they won't communicate it outside and there's always been a problem with internal communications, but that's what happens when you people are dealing with dare I say geeks, you know, communications are not our strongest. Yes, the irony that communication is not our strongest because we're surrounding ourselves with radios that can allow us to be able to communicate better, I suppose. But let's get excited about it. There's all sorts of new things using the internet, using new satellites, and yet we are gonna have a geostationary satellite, by the way. Yeah, when's this happening? First quarter of next year. First quarter of next year. Yeah, awesome, really cool. Some of us here were in Guilford last weekend for the AMSAT colloquium, and how many people who are radio-hams here didn't even know it was going on, so there's very bad internal communications. So we need to address that. Sorry, the radio was making a connection. I'll ask the question again. So what was your actual question? My actual question, I don't have one, I think. Yeah. All right, well done. Thank you, G4GRS. I've just had a rant, thank you. Sorry, I'm gonna have to wrap it up. I guess you can call him if you have any more questions, or if you're like me and have no idea about him, and I think it was good that you dispelled a few myths for me, come and talk to him outside the tent after this. Thank you very much, Ryan. Thank you very much.