 Welcome. It's great to have you here. It's really great to have Rodin here though because he's the speaker if he wasn't here This would be really boring So I didn't bother asking him what kind of intro he wanted because I knew I was gonna pick this one by myself This man is a pillar of the community who has just been making all kinds of fun Well, I mean I guess phone stuff originally, but well, I mean technically that's radio to running your own phone network And then running your own pager network is I mean, I guess that's kind of loosely related to one of those freak guys Telefreak, yeah, and then a whole repeater network. I mean basically he says he's a phone guy, but everything I see up There's a radio so I gotta say this man has been our brother who we've basically never spoken to for years And I'm very pleased to finally have him at our event So I want everyone to thank Andrew for his time and please enjoy pox ag amateur radio pager network Thank you Thank you all for coming. This is kind of a passion that me and my friends at the family kind of all share RF tech Sydney vicious was the world's only hacker dog. So I dedicated to him I work for a spirent security spirent security labs. So shout out to them As he said I'm Andrew strut my call sign is kilo six alpha delta Sierra for the amateur pager network and the Repeater network or repeater system. I brought I have an event call sign for November 7 tango So that'll be good until Tuesday. So I'm gonna go through the pox tech network first and I have some screenshots for it I didn't bring the pod tech network. It's actually up in my room still transmitting a working so if you page or send a tweet for Specific hashtags, it'll come out the pager network and whatnot And if you're an amateur radio operator and you have a call sign you can transmit on that frequency with the appropriate cap codes And you can communicate with it as well, so So we'll get right into it here So talk about how and also the why so we've been doing this for gosh I think five years and originally the idea was me and Jay Falcon. We're talking about what we could do radio wise and something really old-school and We got inspired by a former or current old-school telefreaker who gave a talk at DEF CON 16 he goes by NYC Mike and Snuffle up a guess so originally that was his his thing and So we decided to bring it back and it's been a success. This is our fifth year doing it. So The idea originally was to put together the equipment and and to design and test it at the time when I was talking with Jay Falcon About it and we rolled around the different ideas Over extreme distances and extreme time zone differences. It was a long process to decide what to do and how to do it I had engineered it all kind of in my head and paper and he had some ideas on the software and the coding of it And so while I was in Afghanistan I ended up buying all the equipment and did some tests with it and then I sent it all to Jay Falcon So major props to mr. Jay Falcon who did significant amount of grunt work to make it all work while I was overseas And then and it's been a success ever since so it pretty much bulls down to these these Five pieces of equipment that make it work. So I'll show you some of the pictures, but Most of it really relies on obviously the transmitter for the Pogsack, which is a cheap Chinese black box Not necessarily part 97 FCC compliant, but in doing experimentation is something you can do with amateur radio and And it works very well. So The other piece is the amplifier and I'll show you a picture of that We're not pushing a hundred watts the amplifier will take ten watts in to produce a hundred watts out Last time I tested it a few years ago when I was a little worried about it and doing the RF exposure math because the antenna was in my Hotel room the first year So that was pretty funny as we discussed that and doing the the measurement of the radiation exposure pink And so I think we're only pushing maybe two or three watts out of the out of the transmitter into the amplifier And when I last tested it it was like 40 watts out of the amplifier now the antenna that I have is a Diamond X 50 in in connector. That's a 5 8 wave high gain antenna Useful repeaters and it's almost commercial grade very widely used in the amateur radio community The other point I bring up and bring this up is the feed line and the antenna makes a huge difference Even if you have a crappy Chinese transmitter and a quality amplifier if you're not using good patch cables and good feed line You're gonna get a lot of loss and it'll add up throughout all your cabling and through the antenna as it gets to the antenna And you won't get very good signals so this is one of the things that I've pushed and Learned over the many years of doing amateur radio and engineering is to use quality equipment quality connectors And it really makes a big difference on the on the actual Endpoint so the cabling is important and obviously the laptop, but that's kind of the simplest part was Well, maybe not the simplest because I need to help with it, but because I'm not a big coder, but over the years I think there's been every year a new generation of people who have sat down at my laptop and like refactor the code and in fact Mr. Tux here wants to refactor the code. He's Refactoring code extraordinaire. So he's been begging me all week. So let me get on your laptop and rewrite the code. So I think Jay Falcon wrote it the first time I fussed with it and then far fussed with it and rewrote it and then I Think that might be it maybe yens from the CCC did a couple of iterations on it And so it's kind of a group effort and it's a simple Python code that just communicates over serial So we'll get a little more into it. So here's the Pogfax Pogsack and flex transmitter it'll do flex which is the more sophisticated protocol and We wanted to even though it could do a little bit better protocol and our watches can do the better protocol We wanted to keep it even more old-school. So we continued with Pogsack even though we could do flex which does Bigger payload more data you can push through it can do time sink and a bunch of other things which is cool But we wanted to keep it extra old-school. So that's the transmitter is all it is. It's I found it on I Want to say one of those sites like Alibaba or something like that or Banggood There's one of those Chinese sites and we search and search and search what they sell them for over there In excess all over the place is for like restaurant pagers and stuff like that Those aren't really used much here in the US, but paging is still used all over for many different Industries and it's it's a huge information disclosure issue And I'm not going to repeat a lot of that I'm going to mostly talk about the hardware and our implementation of it if you want to cover all that definitely see NYC Mike's talk from depth Defcon 16 and he covers all the intimate details of decoding it and so on so a lot of good information there But I'm not going to dig too deep into that but also Vlad ghost Kamelsky's here who can also help He works with me with that spiron and if you want to get into decoding paging and need a little pointers Mr. Ghost Kamelsky can help with that. He's at recompiler. So he's right there So I appreciate his help too so So this is a good piece that makes it all kind of happen Not only do you need the good feed line and a good antenna, but you need a good amplifier Obviously we could turn up the power on the transmitter, but it's only capable Maybe five watts if the Chinese specs are right But we turn it down so it's not going to work so hard and we let this do all the work This is a high quality amateur radio amplifier And you can see it'll do anything from 430 megahertz to 450 megahertz And as I mentioned before 10 watts in and a hundred watts out It uses in connectors for UHF microwave frequencies And it has some of the other features in there that we don't use for amateur radio stuff So it's a high quality amp. It doesn't have any spurious emissions and any issues like that And that's one of the things I was adamant about is when I was going to build this and do this is that a we could stay Legal and be we're going to spam the bands with you know a bunch of spurious emissions and piss off local ham operators and whatnot and so on one thing I do and I'll get into a little bit is I and members of the local ham clubs here in Las Vegas and so I do a lot of research on frequency listening and Making sure I'm not going to stomp on other people's projects and other repeaters and so on so we were We were adamant about Choosing the right frequency and fortunately for the last five years no one's complained Every year we come back always check in with my local ham buddies and see if anyone's complained or wanted to file complaint or so on because they would they could file complaint to the FCC if they were pissed but That no one has thankfully and I've been on a good frequency that no one seems to be using One of the things that we do And I'll get into a little bit more is that in the software It does send a call sign, but it doesn't show up on the pager because it doesn't send it with the cap code So every ten minutes there's a call sign that sent out for this time It is in 17 November 7 tango for a telefreak and this is one of the creators of telefreak champ right here And so this year it's an event call sign previous years It was other telefreakers call signs either myself or sleep stacks call sign or Who was the other ones nerds? Yeah, what was it in three RDS? Yeah, so we've used different call signs all legally But this year I saw that it was very easy to get a one by one event call sign with it coordinated with the AWRL and I got that this year and they approved it within the same day or the next day And so I was pretty excited about that to have that so that's the this is the big piece of it Is to have a good amplifier obviously you don't need to drive it too hard when it's paging really hard When people are hammering it the amp does get a little bit warm, but compared to some of the other amateur radio stuff It's more like lukewarm where some of my other equipment for example the UHF 70 centimeter repeater It can essentially get up to like lava hot this only gets up to like lukewarm because we're not working it too hard One of the interesting things is that we do link it to Twitter and a couple other things But Twitter has a hundred and forty characters pox hack only allows 90 characters So most tweets come out in like three pages, so it's not really efficient But we're cram and new technology and old technology, but it but it works So as I mentioned the feed line and I'm not going to get too deep into it But it's very important to get good feed line LMR 900 don't use RG 58 You need good shielding good connectors on the end and when you get an adapter you need a good adapter So I to get into the Chinese transmitter It's B and C so I adapt in to B and C and I made sure there's all gold connectors and so on so that's that's an important piece It makes a huge difference you lose Approximately half a DB per connection So one connection two connections and then the other connections on the back of the amp I mean you're losing a couple DB through that So you want to minimize that loss so you get as much power to the antenna, which does some amplification naturally And it makes a huge difference I built a lot of amateur radio systems have done a lot of engineering with that and and I've gone where I've used the cheap connectors I've used the cheap coax and it works But then when I update it with new stuff it works like 40% better with the same amount of wattage and so on so antenna makes a big difference and The feed line makes a big difference So for the cabling and whatnot It's just serial into the back of the Chinese transmitter But if you notice back in the one of the other slides it does have RJ45 it will talk network, but it only does telnet The web interface it was so atrocious. I didn't I saw it once and I never looked at it again never tried Jay Falcon looked at a couple of the other interfaces that the that the transmitter had But we decided just to maintain old school and just keep it serial super simple and it works really well When I get into the other talk I'll talk a little bit more about the importance of the serial interface So this is just a normal USB to serial interface But it's a one with a more sophisticated driver so that you can tweak The latency the buffers the speed at which it'll communicate serial The the Chinese transmitter doesn't like anything over 9600 bod and not even 9600 bod fast Like if you try to go exactly night, it's it'll it'll skip characters It'll drop out so I slow it down a little bit just to keep it happy and mostly for this kind of stuff So that's an important piece. Fortunately. I've had this thing forever And I only have one and I've been trying to find another one that has that special driver And I haven't had any luck, but it's an important piece there So I run it off a virtual machine and as you guys know I am the rodent so you'll see some of this stuff in there So it just runs off a virtual machine off of a bun to I think it's it's five years old if it ain't broke don't fix it and it never touches the internet really so Well one way with the reverse tunnel So it just runs on a virtual machine with a virtual serial adapter and and that's how it communicates to the transmitter And also shout out to 2600 and to the telefreak badge crew as you can see this is our badge this year so So that's an important piece because if there's no data to push into the transmitter It's obviously not going to work, but it's very simple. We try to keep it as simple as possible It just runs with the a simple set of python scripts that just dump the data to serial and the transmitter just accepts anything you throw at it over serial So like I said, it does send the call sign every ten minutes And then it does send cap codes for different types of messages and so on Vlad had asked me to do some special cap codes, but unfortunately I didn't have time to do it But we might be able to do that a little bit later So but the cap codes are important for the poxac decoding and and you can get more information on that from Vlad So this is what it looks like when it's all like put together It's not super fancy, but you need a good power supply And obviously there's the amp an operation and there's the transmitter and then it's just serial to the laptop So this is a good switching power supply. So there's no spurious noise off of that No ac hum stuff like that that can affect the not only the RF transmission even though it's it's digital But it can affect noise getting into other things the serial and all that is important So for overall reliability of your system You want to make sure that all these different components are higher quality if you can go commercial grade But amateur radio grade is is effective enough So that's an important piece is have a good power supply to make it all work And I like to have things mobile transportable and be able to use multiple power Interfaces or types So I try to run everything all 12 volt because it's easy to get 12 volt off of batteries and to convert that and so on so That's what it looks like when it's all work looking. I took this picture this morning. I rebuilt it all last night There was a little bit of interference or jamming or something like that But that seemed to go away and I wanted to Deconstruct it and rebuild it all back again the repeater and the transmitter for the poxac and it's all it's all working good now, so The legalities around amateur radio is is not that difficult to get into amateur radio. You can learn a lot To get a simple technicians license. It's only 36 questions multiple choice You only need to answer 27 of them correct. So the entry level to get into it is very easy And it's $13 for 10 years and it gives you federally licensed ability to experiment and to do all these Cool things on the amateur band so I encourage people if you want to transmit poxac get a ham license and don't stomp on those bands I request that the FCC request that but it's also just gentlemen's agreement or just being polite with your neighbors and so stuff like that And that matters we all have to cohabitate in the RF spectrums Whether it's cell phones or Bluetooth or whatever but in particular with amateur radio. There's an important piece to that now Talking with other old-school ham radio operators I've had them argue that it's illegal that you can't do it And so the two bullets in part 97 FTC that I pull out is beaconing which is used all over the time all over the place for Propagation testing and stuff like that and then also broadcasting transmissions It used to be that you could only broadcast to everyone if If it was like the space shuttle or QST from the AWRL stuff like that So they since modified the wording a little bit since we don't fly the shuttle unfortunately But you can't broadcast with intended reception by the general public in direct or relayed So there's other bullets that do fall under this type of Transmission, but these are the ones that I think follow What we're doing the best and so it is legal. It's very easy to be legal and And I ask you to do that So one of the pieces that that works and I mentioned it before is coordination to know your local ham operators That you're going to be sharing those frequencies with potentially to know your local ham clubs and whatnot get friendly with them You know the last ham club I joined in in Washington, DC was $25 for five years So I mean it's not really hard to get in with those guys. I went to their Amateur day amateur field day. I brought my repeater out and You know you can learn a lot from these guys and share information and they'll kind of look out for you as well So if you're using a frequency or doing something wrong, they'll give you some help They'll give you some advice Just yesterday Drew. He brought another friend of ours and he's an amateur extra the highest class you can get and he's helping me Diagnose some of that stuff and we're on the same page But it's nice to be able to bounce stuff off other hands and other tech-savvy people To either validate what you're thinking or to invalidate it say no, you don't know It's something else. So it was nice to be able to talk with other hands. It really works Well research one of the things I did is just to Google my face off to find what other people are using on frequencies And these types of transmissions and that's a big effort of it and then also just listening in observation Before I get on a frequency and start stomping out and using it I'll listen for days or weeks at a time to see if anyone else pops up on that frequency and uses it So you want to share it and be polite about it Pogsack the transmissions are very intermittent So it comes and goes so you're not necessarily transmitted all the time So it's kind of hard to determine if you're messing with someone or not So one of the things I did before we started transmitting here in Vegas was ass local hams I asked the local clubs I was a part of and then I just listened to the frequency that we use 433 megahertz 500 kilohertz 433.500 and I listened to that for weeks Remotely over the internet and then while I was here on site before we started transmitting and even when I came back Five years later this time before I started transmitting I turned on all my radios And I listened to that frequency for hours to make sure that no one is using it while I was gone So it is coordinated in that sense But it's not necessarily official like a permanent repeater pair that that gets coordinated with local clubs and with the AWRL and so on So observation is a big deal If you've done your research and your observation and you still can't feel comfortable with it always fall back on your band plans AWRL does publish all the plans for different frequency spectrums And they do also have slices in some of these spectrums for experimentation So if you're doing something that's polite and neighborly But you isn't necessarily part 97 compliant you're doing experimentation You are allowed to do that and that's one of the cool things that I got an amateur radios because Like years ago before we even had the TSA. I would carry my ham radios on planes and stuff and they would harass me I would show my FCC license on a federally licensed like I can carry this I can use this and they don't know what to say Don't transmit when you're on a plane Trust me. You don't want to do that. Legally if you have the permission of the captain of the flight you can transmit I've gotten that permission before and I was able to talk on a repeater network from like 250 miles away from Sacramento that was the best I ever did on VHF, but I had the permission of the captain Since then many years ago. I think they've kind of tweaked the rules So but I think the captain has the ultimate say on that so definitely utilize your clubs and peers That are that you're sharing the spectrums with that's it's an important piece. So Let me see what else I got here That's towards the end of it But you can always find us on our seat at 2600 at all the telefreakers and us hams and hackers are in pound telefreak You can chat with us and you can follow my Twitter Andrew underscore strut and This is basically what I look like when I'm working So I think that's 25 minutes is what I had so if anyone has any questions. I'm happy to Answer any and we'll start with Miss Lindsay here The question is when am I going to get an extra license and actually I've been studying for the general I'm big on baby steps. So I'm pretty confident with the general. I've had a tech plus for like ever So I do want to upgrade a general because that gives you More bands that you can use I think higher power transmission and certain bands and so on And a little more credibility with my fellow peers who are ham operators as well So good question. I'm working on it, but baby steps. I'm not going to jump up to extra I'll get the general first. So thank you. Thank you. Beave. What's your question? okay, so the question is range and Source code methodology are naming convention Okay, so the the best range that we ever reported was sleep stack drove was like driving home or somewhere And he was all the way out by state line past Jean got to the California state border and before he got over the hill He was still getting pages. So that was well over 50 miles Fortunately that year I had a nice suite and it had windows like three quarters of around my room And so I had the antenna like with half the view down the strip and half the view down to the southwest to California And so it really depends the propagation really is affected by antenna placement and which hotel suite I get so That's been the best recorded range that was verifiable was from sleep stack over state line over 50 miles But it definitely saturates The casino or the immediate a quarter mile Yeah, it does the range is quite good now the follow-up question that he had was about our highly complex source code naming convention and like I said We've been doing this for five years. There's been several iterations of the software and so the naming convention I think we're on now is test for so And once it works it works so you know I haven't like pushed at the github or anything like that but I might do that but it's very simple stuff You're just dumping the raw data to the serial port, you know tux could tell you there's like a half a million different ways You can do that with Python and he'll probably do it a quarter of a million different ways So but we do keep it simple and once it's working We're not going to beat ourselves up over it and you know and Make a name for a copyrighted trademark You know we tested and tested him like the third or fourth time it worked and And and remember what it's called because sometimes I just I just suspend the VM until next year And I open it up and I'm looking at the scripts and I'm like God Who's the last one you look at the history? We use this one this one this one this one this one this one But we had to go by date this time So I looked at the date is 2016 August and and we're able to find which script we use last time So that's The majority of it. It's the implementation of what makes it all happen or whatnot And we can get more into decoding Pog sack and whatnot because we're certainly spamming that band. There's a lot of information a lot of RF going out there and And you can decode it. It's it's cool stuff Tux you had a question What does the TSA say about me dragging my equipment on the planes? Well? Nothing very pleasant They have a lot of questions. I use my FCC license pretty heavily I use my government ID pretty heavily to obviously I'm not just some schmuck with a bunch of gears gonna Try to take apart the plane while I'm flying with tools and so on but this year I actually paid the oversize fee and packed it all in one big giant box So I carry my handhelds I carry some tools with me and so on but like this repeater and the other stuff I didn't have it on my carry-on. So TSA didn't say too much But I did have them pre-inspect it before they accepted it to go down And so I stood there as he opened up the box and went holy Christ. What is this FCC license? And and he's like, okay, and he what is this and the FCC license, you know So it's it's effective and just total amateur radio operator and this is my equipment and they don't know And it's not illegal. It's just they have questions and they have to swipe it down and all that stuff But they do always ask about my handhelds and why I have that on the plane and so on and one of the things that the Vlad and I do is Aries amateur radio emergency service and You know all of our other comms aren't always going to be there And so you have to fall back on what still works and that's amateur radio. So any other questions good question How much does an event license cost it's totally free. Yeah, you just go to the AWRL. There's a website I think it's 1x 1x1 call.org or something like that. You can Google it up You just apply put in your call sign put in your information what you're using it for and for me They approved it the very next day. So a couple of the questions Here he was first here. We'll get you. Well Yes, you can the question is can you do things like APRS messaging through Pogsack? For example flex has more Features within that protocol not necessarily location stuff But I'll get into I have another piece that does do APRS and location-based stuff But the protocol was this was like 30 40 years ago Now the other piece of remind you is the information disclosure if you start decoding the stuff out there You'll find stuff from telecommunications Aviation Medical and all kinds of stuff that's out there to decode decode it legally do it ethically Don't propagate that information unintentionally, but my favorite one was watching pages to central office technicians where they get the address of the central office the door code and What they're supposed to do at the central office. So with that page You know, yeah So there's another question. Yeah So the question is regarding formalities or proper etiquette if you're gonna transmit on Pogsack or use the hashtags and whatnot Obviously some rules apply because it does go from Twitter to Amateur radio. I think the only major stipulation that is an issue for me is is cursing Unfortunately, it's not censorship. It's just you know, you don't have to be a dick all the time So you don't have to curse but That's I think the only thing that is really an issue is just That sort of thing so That's the question I've actually been looking at it this time for previous years. We never had a problem with it this year There's something different. So Sorry, the question was are we doing anything to filter the Content that we don't like So we try not to it's usually not an issue I think I only noticed it a couple times in the previous years, but for summaries in this year I guess people curse more they're talking to me more and I curse a lot so not on ham, but So yeah, the great question though and we'll look at that more as we advance the code over the years every year There's a new reiteration of a new refactoring There'll be a test 5 Python script for next year and And and so on so but that's a good question and we'll look into that especially I want to stay as compliant as possible It's certainly an issue And I was thinking about that long and hard last couple days because right out the gate I started noticing it and I was like So any other questions Great, thank you very much great questions. Thank you for listening really appreciate it