 My call sign is right there on the front slide. KC7IB, it's kind of cutting off down there on the bottom left. So feel free to look me up and send me all kinds of crappy email and things like that. As an amateur radio, there's a lot of information about you that's contained out on the internet. So that's one thing you just kind of have to open up to and say, well, I'm going to go ahead and expose myself and say I'm an amateur. Things, because it is a federal license that you hold, there is information that has to be accessible outside of your maybe comfort level. But that's just one of the deals that you have to deal with as an amateur. We're going to go through and talk a little bit about what amateur radio is and how you go about getting licensed and what some of the new cool things are that we're doing as amateurs in the amateur community. So first of all, we're going to talk about what amateur radio is. Then we'll jump into the different types of two-way radios. There's kind of two primary categories that radios fall into, and we'll talk about those. In that, we'll also talk about a new thing called IRLP and we'll do a quick little demo on that. We're going to talk about APRS, jump into HSMM, and then I'm going to cover a 25-mile linking project that we did using HSMM and show you the specs and stuff of the equipment that we used and how that all laid out. So I'll definitely try to keep that in the timeframe. We've got a lot of information to cover, so I'll try to buzz through a lot of the first stuff because a lot of it's widely available online, especially. So what is amateur radio? How many of you are hams in here? All right, cool. So that makes my job a lot easier because you guys already know a special list of stuff. So I'm going to breeze through this. If you have questions, this presentation didn't make it onto the CD, but if you need it, my email address is at the end. You can email me and I'll send it over to you. So amateur radio, in 1992, excuse me, 1992. In 1912, the first radio laws were passed by the Federal Communication Commission. In 1914, amateurs started to use radios. So that started to form the Amateur Radio Service, and it kind of went on from there and it expanded to what it is today. The FCC originally decided that the Amateur Radio Service was going to be developed and licensable due to a couple of things. One, they wanted hobbyists that were interested in radio and radio technology to be able to kind of innovate that market. Also, volunteers for public service. One of the big things amateur radio operators do is they help out with public service. This means working with different volunteer groups such as the Red Cross and things like that, going out and doing runs and providing communication for runs and bike rides and all that kind of stuff, as well as disaster response. So if there's some type of earthquake or tornado or something like that, going out and helping out with communication assistance on those events. Amateur radio was heavily involved, involved very recently when the space shuttle blew up over South Texas. There was a large amateur population that went down there and helped with the recovery and coordination of the recovery of all the different parts of the space shuttle. They were heavily involved in a lot of the major disasters. 9-11 was another one. There were tons of amateur involvement over in New York and the surrounding areas due to that event and all of a sudden the communication abilities of amateur radio stepped up where public service radios tend to fall down and kind of fall on their face. And also, the FCC wanted experts. They wanted experts that were out there that would offer insight into the field and be able to expand on what's already there. One of the big things we've seen in amateur radio lately, and I was just talking to a gentleman before the talk, was kind of going to slow down in technology of amateur radio. We haven't had a lot of new developments and for the first time the things that I'm talking about like HSMM and IRLP are taking commercial technologies and moving them over to amateur radio. Typically it's always been the other way around. We as amateurs have developed the technologies and pushed them over to the commercial side. So we've kind of seen a reverse of this and I'm not sure exactly why that is. A lot of people think amateur radio is strictly a bunch of old guys talking to each other halfway around the world. If you can talk to another old guy around the world, that's fine. That's one small portion of amateur radio. There's a lot more you can do. And those of us at this conference that are developers, coders and things like that can really help out the amateur community by putting some of our skills to the plate and being able to help out in developing some of the new applications. And hopefully these technologies that we've taken from the commercial side, brought over to amateur radio, we can enhance them and send them back over so it makes that side much better. And so that's hopefully what we'll be able to do as amateurs going forward since we've started taking technology from the commercial side instead of giving it back. So how does one go about getting licensed? Well there's various different license levels and the licensing has changed fairly recently. It's actually continually changing all the time. There used to be the big standing thing that you had to have a Morris Code Test and the licenses are such now that you do not require a Morris Code Test unless you want a higher class license. But the basic license is a simple 35 question test it's called Element 2 and it's basic operation and some engineering stuff. A good portion of us should already probably know with just what we do on a daily basis working on computers and various electronics. So there is no Morris Code Test if you want to operate from 30 megahertz and above. All your public safety and public service stuff that's out there now, your police and fire department, all that's way higher than 30 megahertz. So you can operate the same kind of radio systems that they do typically on amateur radio with that single license. And if you want some other types of abilities and some more long distance type of communication there's some other tests in some Morris Code you have to pass. Now the fastest Morris Code that you have to do if you want to get those licenses is I believe five words per minute. Anybody correct me if I'm wrong? But I think it's five words per minute is the maximum now. So I went through that a little while when they had the Tech Plus licensing. I went through and got my five words so I'm done. But I just still hold the Tech Plus I haven't got off my bed to upgrade yet but I think I might do that very soon. So what can we do with amateur radio? You can talk to people. So like I said earlier if you're an old guy you can talk to another old guy. Even if you're young you can still talk to an old guy because sometimes you can learn a lot from them. So you can build transmitters, receivers and antennas. Now when I say that anybody can do it but amateurs can do it legally. And that's the whole thing here. There's a lot of legal differences in amateur radio because anybody can go out and build a receiver or build a transmitter or something like that but it's not legal. Amateurs can do it legally. So it's always nice to be able to build that kind of stuff use it on a daily basis or a weekly basis and actually have made it yourself. I've found out that I'm not good at antennas. I'll admit that. I love getting involved in the projects. Spend all this money to make this stuff. The things never work. So I've got a great other story about getting some nice RF energy while trying to adjust an antenna. So a couple of my buddies over here helped me out with that by keying the mic for me. Emergency communications, like I said you can do a lot of public safety things. If you're involved in it heavily enough you can get some really cool identification and some really cool access to some really neat places if you get involved in it. A lot of emergency communication centers, EOCs, government facilities, things like that if you're actually into it go through the submission process get your background checks, whatever you need to do you can actually get some access to some really really cool places. TV broadcasting, you have amateur television which is great. You can actually set up your own little TV station broadcast out and talk to other people and send video back and forth between people. We actually have a, I mean from the Dallas area and we have an ATV repeater there so people can send images through the repeater and other people can pull them down and stuff. So it's actually pretty cool. Direction finding, we saw the first direction finding contest here at DefCon I believe it was the first all time one at least the first war driving one where they sent mobile people out and you had to go find them. That's cool but that's kind of an amateur radio thing that they've been doing for years on amateur radio. So if you like that and you're kind of into that you can do direction finding all the time. Somebody will go out and be the fox and everybody else is the hound and they go out in the field and transmit somewhere and everybody else gets in their cars with all their fun looking antennas hanging out the window and the halls down the street trying to find them. So those contests are a lot of fun. A lot of areas actually have regular contests like it'll be the third Saturday of every month they'll have a direction finding contest and everybody goes out with other equipment and some people buy the commercial equipment I had a Doppler system that I used for a while it's one of the little four antenna systems that sits on the back of your car much like the low jack system that police use. So some kind of do that I have in my car with a little rose compass that gives you the direction of the transmitter so you can pretty much drive right to them. So mess that one up by transmitting into it one day and it doesn't work anymore. Now it's just an expensive thing that sits on the car it looks cool but it doesn't do me any good. Oops one button. Okay so let's jump into two radios. Like I said there's basically two types of radios and when a lot of people think amateur radio they think we're big right? You've probably seen at least in your neighborhood the big tower by some dude's house with the big antennas on top and if you're not into radios and you're not a geek kind of person you probably look at that and say what the hell? But otherwise people look at that and think oh that's pretty cool looking I like it, I like those things I think they look good. So those are HF communications or high frequency basically made for long distance I'm going all the way around the world I'm getting out of the local area. The radio up here on the top is a similar type of radio you have and you can see the tower here with the nice directional antenna up there on the top of it. So that's basically communication from state to state or state to countries it's your moving big time you're sending your transmission long distances and it typically involves a quite involved setup as you see with the tower now there are some other aspects of HF communication you can do low power and just real small operations and be very portable with it and that's also fun to play with but that's typical HF communications long distance I'm communicating long ways away The other form is VHF and UHF communications this is the kind that I typically am involved in as a tech plus this is where I have the majority of my frequency prodigies and so here's two examples of the vehicle these aren't my vehicles I just pulled these off the internet so these might be somebody in here I don't know but I thought they were kind of cool especially with bar room this looks great so I was mounting some equipment in my car the other day and I actually had my wife come out and get in the passenger seat and say do you still have enough room because I'm trying to invade over onto her side and so ever since then she complains I don't have enough room with this thing here and I said well I brought you out and you've had your chance to move it somewhere else but I don't know it doesn't work no, no so I keep wanting to have her just take her own car so I drive in my car she drives in her car she doesn't like that idea but VHF, UHF communications is basically for local communications typically local cities and counties kind of communicating back and forth just radio to radio you can communicate several miles depending on how much power you're putting out we have what are called repeaters which allow me to transmit to a repeater the repeater repeats my signal and sends it back out then you can get very far communications especially in these areas over here on the west coast that have mountains you can put the repeaters up on mountains and you can get all kinds of coverage you can get some really neat things it's very portable, very mobile the radio that I carry typically my little handheld radio is here and I'm going to use this in a demonstration momentarily so it's just nice and small and I can communicate a lot of places with that and it's kind of my main form of communication next to the mobile radio that I have up here all kinds of other good stuff you can do on VHF and UHF most of the stuff that I'm going to talk about here in fact all the stuff that I'm going to talk about has to do with the technician or higher class license so you can do everything with the basic level license that we're talking about so all the good stuff and IRLP this is a new thing I didn't have it originally in my presentation but I said it's so cool we need to add it in IRLP is the internet radio linking project what happens there's a internet repeater linking project thank you internet repeater linking project that's correct so what's involved with IRLP is basically you used to have a repeater in an individual area so you would talk to that repeater and it would repeat your signal out so some guys then said hey what if we link multiple repeaters together so they did it via a couple different ways they would do an RF back end and link with like a UHF frequency a 400 megahertz frequency on a 100 megahertz repeater and then link multiple repeaters together they started using data lines using two lines and things like that to link the repeaters together that way and then some ingenious people said hey wait a second we've got this big thing called the internet out there what if we take the data and use the communication from the repeater change it over to a data form use voice over IP send it over to the internet and connect to another repeater somewhere else and so what you have now is you have IRLP which is a central database essentially of all these different repeaters all around the world that you can interconnect to so from the repeater here in Las Vegas which I'll show you here in a second we can talk to people all over the world so with my little 2 meter privileges or 70 centimeter privileges or my technician license I can talk to people all over the world in fact this morning I was talking to a guy and I think he was in Poland if I'm not mistaken oh Holland, Holland just out here on the balcony just to verify that my radio was working and everything was all set up so with that let me go ahead and get set up here to do a quick little demonstration of IRLP so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the mean Las Vegas mode here it's a 500 watt transmitter and it's connected to what's called the Western Reflector the Western Reflector is a central mode that multiple modes can connect into so it's a one to many kind of relationship where typically IRLP is a one to one relationship it's one repeater connecting to another one this is a central mode that allows multiple people to connect into it so let me bring this up here real quick and see if we can make a quick call and see if somebody's on frequency that will come back to us yeah, sure after I'm done with the demo this is KC7IIB Las Vegas doing IRLP demonstration is anybody on frequency? KC7IIB of course this is the one thing you're depending on the station that came back BV City in New York City what was the call sign again? Q7EB2 O'Call, Ritzke, Ritzke, New York yeah, WB2 HWW this is QO Charlie 7 in India Bravo Las Vegas, Nevada doing a demonstration room of probably what do you think? about a hundred people in there maybe? a hundred people or so just doing a quick IRLP demonstration how do you do a signal-sign? hello, my name is Chris I drop out to Guralia my name is Howard I'm from the opposite city of Guralia, Denmark I'm in question claim 13 miles east of the Manhattan and I'll say good morning good afternoon to you guys in Vegas and I'm on an HT running about two laps 10-7, I'm on WB2 WB2 HWW in New York WB2 HWW this is QO Charlie 7 in India Bravo, Las Vegas, Nevada I appreciate the contact is there any other stations on frequency? this is QO Charlie 7 in India Bravo doing a quick IRLP demonstration from Las Vegas, Nevada and I'll be back with Portland, go ahead let's try that again Yankee 4 Whiskey maybe? this is QO Charlie 7 in India Bravo, Las Vegas, Nevada looks like we've got a whole bunch of people in there the station up in Alaska this is QO Charlie 7 in India Bravo, Las Vegas, Nevada go ahead excellent, I appreciate the contact, Jim again, this is QO Charlie 7 in India Bravo let's see if we can get one more station in here and then we'll have to move on with the rest of our demonstration again, this is KC7 IAB doing a quick IRLP demonstration do we have any other stations on frequency? KC7 IAB, Las Vegas, Nevada Alpha, Alpha, Yankee, John and Mobile in Tigard, Oregon and John, I just got the last part of the call sign there Alpha, Alpha, Yankee, I appreciate the check in there so thank you very much that I'll conclude my demonstration and I appreciate all the stations that were able to come back this is QO Charlie 7 in India Bravo Clear of the Western Reflector, Las Vegas, Nevada okay, so now that we've finished the demo the Western Reflector here in Las Vegas is on 447.0 it's run by a gentleman W7AOR as his call sign like I said, that's an essential reflector here so anybody with their IRLP abilities essentially, which is any licensed amateur can connect up to that repeater and talk to basically anybody around the world we won't be able to get anybody out of the country but you depend on a lot of different factors Alaska's pretty close to out of the country it's a pretty far distant communication there so it's essentially out of the country, right? Am I offending anybody? Sorry 447.0 if you go out and do a Google search on IRLP you can find out all kinds of cool stuff about it there's a nice central website that lists all the nodes out out there and tell you what the status is and where they're connected to the Western Reflector is probably one of the biggest ones the Western Reflector is connected to a reflector up in Alaska so there's two reflectors actually connected together so you can get a lot of people here people from Alaska here, a lot of people from Las Vegas obviously because that's where the node is based we also have a North Texas Reflector I think it's called North Texas Reflector I can't remember, I've never owned that one but it's kind of cool because you can now take this little teeny hand node and I can talk to someone in Alaska I don't need that billion tanning and all that big fancy stuff I can do it here and as you hear a couple of those people who are mobile I've heard people on bicycles I've heard people just out walking it's kind of neat and it's a fun thing to be able to do and that's using voice over IP here the calls are pretty clear it's a typical chop and data kind of mix up that you get from those type of situations so that's basically IRLP so let's move on to APRS this is another fun thing that I've been playing with lately Automatic Position Reporting System this is kind of cool this is like Ultra Low Jack Low Jack's kind of neat because they turn it on and somebody has to go out in the direction behind the car this tells me right where I'm at it gives me the GPS locations but it's dependent on a lot of other factors and as you can see with amateur radio I was dependent on a lot of factors I was dependent on that I could get to the repeater I was dependent that that repeater was working depending on whoever's internet connection is being used for that dependent on the other guy's internet connection there was a lot of factors that I'm relying on APRS is the same way you're relying on multiple stations for your communication to be able to go through so it's the Automatic Position Reporting System it's basically made up of a radio a GPS and a TNC a TNC is a turn on node controller it's basically like a modem digital communications just like you would over a wire but over the wire currently position is broadcast excuse me current position is broadcast onto the APRS network and received by all the other stations that are out there so anybody that can hear me then hears that position report it uses the AX.25 protocol at 1200 Bob when we're running VHF frequencies at 100 MHz so you say wow that's really slow but in reality all you're seeing is your position and that's how big a deal now there is some problems with APRS because of frequency management things like that there's a central frequency APRS uses and with all the people jumping on and getting APRS stations up it's becoming a little bit crowded so there's some changes that are going to happen to continue using APRS going forward if it keeps growing in popularity it's great for tracking objects especially if mobile this is really used a lot in public service events to track up where ambulances are track a unit on an ambulance and then follow it anywhere on a map and know exactly where that station is also if you wanted to track your buddy theoretically you could throw one of these little units in the back of the car and then track wherever they're at same kind of thing it also allows for text messaging now that's no big deal anymore since we all have that pretty much on our cell phones but you can send messages back and forth from station to station sending simple text messages back and forth so it's kind of neat to be able to do that as well the main thing is the position reporting though the broadcast of beacons which is basically a single packet that goes out of the station and is received by any stations that are within range of that other station so if I transmit a beacon here anybody around this building around this area is going to hear that and be able to log that into their map the packet may be received and decoded by anybody who hears it so that means you can't really think okay I'm only going to send this to a specific person or a specific place it's anybody that can hear that digipeter stations hear that packet and basically repeat it for me so they'll send it on so right now I'm just up here and just a little person up on the table here I send off a beacon packet that will then be relayed by other stations so then that will be relayed over and over through various digipeters to get to wherever I'm trying to get the packet to ultimately and then eventually if I need to go where long distance it should drop off to an iGate station which takes that data, wraps it up over the internet and sucks it down on the other side and sends it out so that allows you to be able to talk back and forth long distance over the internet using this digital communication to be able to send position reports back and forth over the internet so this is a quick map of the United States with all the different stations we're putting in can't really tell much from this it's pretty convoluted, there's a lot of stations out there doing APRS and like I said it is getting a little bit busy so you can see all the icons represented with respective call signs on there all kind of piled up on top of each other and see my station's right, right there but if you zoom down on the map like this and do a little bit more detailed film you can see the actual street level and then the icon with the call sign that's my call KC7 iGate and that's one of the locations I went to in Dallas where I was at actually close to my house now that I look at it but that can actually zoom down to that kind of level so you can get that kind of detail you can use different mapping programs and I'll show you one example of a real basic software you can use real advanced mapping stuff like Microsoft mapping program map point and some other things like that so you can get some really good maps in there you can build your own maps and do position reporting on all the different stations with those iGate stations they pulled all the information up to the internet and there are websites out there that you can actually go to and type in the call sign and pull up the location of these different stations so you can actually pull them up at any time and see the location of where these are at so types of APR stations we have Digipeters which are basically like repeaters internet gateways, fixed stations, trackers mobile stations and passive stations passive stations is more of what we're going to do today we're just going to kind of listen to what's going on out there mobile stations give you things in your car trackers, it's basically a device that's going to be stuck in something like in a vehicle or something like that it's not going to have two way communication it's just going to be sending out its position that everybody else will be able to look at and get the information attached to it sending off weather data as well so here's basically like a low cost tracker station you've got basically four main components the radio, the TNC which you can use like a TNC the picking coder or the tiny track 3 which is like this little blue box down here which are about a, I think 70 bucks or so if you buy it it'll send you 40 bucks if you put it together yourself a battery and a GPS you can give yourself a little pelican case and 10 I forgot to put that on there but then you've got all that stuff in that little case you can throw that in the back of a vehicle and it's all good in tracking it and doing whatever you need to do so kind of a little portable APR station there I mean see it's just a little handheld radio like the one I've got up here so the interconnect is basically your GPS connects to the TNC which connects to the radio so it's pretty straight forward connection so nothing majorly complex in the interconnect mobile stations basically mobile stations is the same as like a tracker station except you have some additional abilities you typically would have some type of computer with it maybe some additional display or some additional information coming out like that so it's basically the same as if you add on a PC here's one of the pieces of software you can use this is called APRS Street Atlas or APRS Plus uses the Street Atlas program you've got a display here of all the different stations it's heard and then that will correspond to maps and you can pull out the mapping data where those stations are at pull out maps and do tracking through everything so and here's a typical mobile interconnect you've got your computer here with a GPS fed into your computer which also means you can track your location so you can do all the fancy old street mapping thing like Street Atlas and all the other ones allow you to do that interconnects to your TNC that connects to your radio so again pretty straight forward interconnect there you also have a purpose built radio which is what I've got up here it's a Kenwood D700 which basically acts as the computer for me so what it allows me to do is I can connect a computer to it like I have today so we can actually get a full map display and things like that but it's got a display on it that I can get full readouts of what's going on and I've got a screenshot of one of the readouts that we can see here so the GPS and the radio is really all I need and then I've got an optional computer that I can connect to it and then that sends all the data out there so that's a great little radio as well so then we look at the quick little APRS demo here this is a screenshot of one of the stations that I talked to this is one of my buddies Mike this is his station we were sending messages back and forth I was in Dallas he was in Salt Lake City and we were messaging back and forth and then see right here it gives his position and says he's 100 excuse me, 1,016 miles away from me kind of in the north north west there which is accurate if I was in Dallas and he was Salt Lake and then it gives a couple little comments here there's this call sign up here at the top you've got a single type of radio he's using the speed of the communication is 1200 baud his status is in service and then right here is his icon so which icon you can change and this is also the grid square locator here it gives me a little bit better idea of where he's at locally or nationally there so let me pull up a little map here real quick I've just had this APRS station running and we're not seeing too many stations on this but you can see we've got actually three stations there we've got Casey 7RID which is Mike he's actually out in the parking lot Casey 7RID my station is the little house right here and then there's another car up here which is KG6M1-3 so let me back this out a little bit here and it looks like that's all we've actually received at this point it could be that the reception is a little bit poor in here but there's a lot of different APRS stations out there that would be purting in I seem to have been getting bad reception here on the APRS network through the last little bit so definitely not a very large reception around the area so there's definitely a lot of stations involved in that so you can see with a simple map like this it doesn't give you a lot of detail where everything's at but you can get a pretty good idea of where the stations are located and the fact that they're tracking typically if they're mobile I mean you can imagine this guy's probably mobile he's here on some sort of major road I'm not sure that road there is and I'm not familiar with the roads here but on some of the software actually you'll be able to click on the stations and it will give you various information on them so let's actually pull this up here we'll pull up Mike's station oops, there we go so we can see here here's Mike Casey, 79ID we can see he's actually giving a status of a route to Defcon actually I think he's already here because he's right over there and this gives it the actual packets that we've received and the path of the packets some various information there so you can pull that up with different software different kinds of different things you can track stations long term you can pull up dedicated naps and only track certain stations you can do all kinds of fun stuff with it so this program right here is called WinAPRS it's a free download but they don't like to register it you have to pay some money I haven't registered mine because I typically don't use this one so but then this is back on the D700 this is what it would look like this is the actual D700 here and you can pull up that station so HSNM let's talk about that because that's kind of some fun stuff HSNM is High Speed Multimedia it's kind of a cool little deal it's High Speed Multimedia is basically 802.11 AB and G for hams so we can't have Defcon without talking about 802.11 right but I promise I won't talk about any of the vulnerabilities or any of that kind of stuff because we already know about those things so different laws apply to hams especially in regards to 802.11 stuff you've got part 15 part 15 versus part 97 and we'll talk a little bit about the differences between those and there's been a recent law that's changed just in the last couple of days that has affected those so we'll talk about that as well so part 15 versus part 97 part 15, that's all you common folk that don't have licenses part 97, that's the license folk like me and the other people in here that have licenses and you don't always have to operate if I'm licensed it doesn't necessarily have to operate under part 97 it means I have the ability to if I choose to then I have to follow certain rules just like if you operate under part 15 you're supposed to follow certain rules you don't have to but it is federally recommended so off the shelf equipment so you go to your local Best Buy, CompUSL or God forbid you go to Fry's for some reason you buy equipment, your little links or your Cisco or whatever it's intended for part 15 operation they're not expecting you to use that for amateur radio although you can do it so it's expected for part 15 if you're licensed you can actually operate it under part 97 which gives you some unique advantages so your basic advantages you get in a nutshell are no power and the abilities and the answering that you want and no power is always a good thing right especially when you're doing your wifi shootout contests and stuff a lot of that stuff is a lot more than legal if you have a hand license but like I said sure you can do this you can do anything you want you can go buy this Nexus thing and crank out all kinds of wattage out of the thing but it's not legal and so if you have a license you can actually do it legally so those are just some rules that we need to kind of follow here but with a license you're basically free and clear and you're not breaking any federal laws chances of you getting caught doing anything are probably pretty well as it is but if you do they're going to nail you pretty hard because it is a federal offense so this is the rule that was just passed fairly recently it was passed on the 12th and it changed the way antennas specifically are specced out for 802.11 and various wireless devices it basically impacts part 2 and part 15 of the operation and mainly section 2.18 where we're mainly interested and it basically talks about replacement antennas for unlicensed devices unlicensed devices are things like linksus access points, Cisco access points all that kind of stuff because you yourself don't have to have a license to use that you can just go buy it and it's wireless and you use it so it specifically talks about the replacement antennas for those devices basically says companies, oh what I'm saying is it allows you to change out those antennas based on manufacturers recommendations and I know what you're saying is wait a second there's companies out there like FabCorp and all the other ones that sell antennas right well it's legal to sell them it's just not legal to use them so that's a little loophole that FabCorp doesn't necessarily tell you about until now, now the laws have actually changed so you could always go to FabCorp and buy these big antennas, these high gain things unplug them in your little linksus access point or whatever you're using but that's actually illegal now why that's the law, that's what it said can you do it? sure you can do it if you're running under part 97 it's legal you can actually do it and you have no problem so legal to sell you neither to use unless you're licensed basically what it changed this net to now is manufacturers can list out the specifications of an antenna so it used to be that they had to specifically say this antenna was tested and meets within our criteria, now they can say we tested a 14 dB waggy with this and it was within spec so now you can go get any 14 dB waggy or lower and use it so it will actually change the benefit of unlicensed people which actually makes it kind of nice for places like FabCorp because now they're selling stuff and it can actually be legally used on any kind of equipment without a problem so that's basically what changed this so it kind of took away from the part 97 operation a little bit because before in part 97 we could use any antenna we wanted to but now pretty much anybody can as long as it meets within the manufacturer specifications that they put out with the equipment so part 97 pros and cons part 97 pros many antenna choices, I can use any antenna I want on my radio, I can use anything I want, I can use it on an access point whatever I want as far as the antenna goes I can make it, I can buy it, I can do whatever I want that way and I have a lot of opportunities to use different types of antennas and different types of setups so that's actually a very nice thing power amplifiers, I get up to 100 watts of power out of my access point so the little ones off the shelf are considerably less than that and I think the limit is like 1.2 watts maximum so I think I've got that in the next slide and I can use them 100 mills 100 watts of power I've got a lot of power that can come out of my access point without a problem at all and fully within the law and I can easily modify equipment so if I take it and modify it I can actually put it back under the air without a problem so that's the new problem, I can take this little handheld radio here, modify it to make it do whatever I want it to do and put it back under the air without a problem you can take a native radio and try to do it on a police frequency, that's illegal you violate the type of seconds of the radio so it allows me to be able to modify equipment and be able to put it back on the air the cons of running under part 97 encryption, this is a big debate right now because any amateur radio that's designed is everything to be open open and allow anybody to interconnect and allow anybody to do anything as long as they're licensed so the debate about encryption is you can't use encryption on typical radio systems because you're trying to obscure the message and that's kind of a thing, if you're trying to obscure the message you can't use encryption, but here if I take the stance of I'm running a part 97 HSMM station and I don't want unlicensed people to connect to it so I'm going to encrypt my data with a web key to prevent other people from connecting to it now I'm doing that to protect the integrity of my station and that is illegal but if I'm trying to encrypt to obscure the data that is illegal, so there's a big debate on what side encryption falls on so right now kind of the standard way is you can encrypt it but you have to publicly post your web key which is fine because if you think about it the average person isn't going to know to go to the ham radio website of your club, dig down to some stupid link down there and see the actual web key nor are they going to go to trouble for your stupid station at your house right, they're going to go down but it doesn't have web to get on to the internet or do whatever they're doing easy for content to violate FCC with amateur radio there are specific rules about what you can you can't do as many of you are aware you can't get on to these kind of foul language you can't do that kind of stuff because that's not part of amateur radio sure you can do it but you're violating the law and the other hands out there that do direction finding will come find you and they will report you to the FCC so you can easily violate content rules automatic power controls are required for different types of stations third part of traffic is an issue that's what I was talking about if I set up a station what happens if somebody else connects to it and starts sending data through me I'm actually responsible for that connection I can't keep that signal of that station in tact where nobody else can connect to it and then identification I have to send out my call sign of the regular interval and identify my station so those are some of the negatives for part 97 what was that I'm saying the question was how do you do that when you could do it with the SSID because the SSID is regularly broadcast so you could put the call sign as your SSID that's kind of the unwritten standard the other way you could do it is there are some applications out there that embed it within a ping packet so instead of the ping packet being 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, ABCD you know that kind of thing it actually puts your call sign in the body of the ping packet and then you have the ping station on the network and it sends it out so as long as the call sign goes out over the wire you're fine then basic part 15 operation pros and cons there's no content no content restrictions if I set up an access point on the part 15 I can do whatever I want no third party issues welcome to the board boys come on unless my ISP doesn't like it they don't want me to complain about it strong encryption variable I can encrypt it, I can veto it I can do whatever I want no frequencies available because within the part 97 operation specifically with HSMM and 802.11b you have a limited frequency range it's only channels 1 through 6 if I'm not mistaken you don't have the higher frequencies or the higher channels available to you so you actually get more frequencies if you use part 15 and you don't need to identify put the thing up, plug it in, turn it on never use it and it doesn't make a difference it can just sit there and operate very limited hardware operations that's definitely a con it's kind of what you see is what you get you buy it and that's pretty much it with the exception of some of the access points that we recently found you can go to the next and things like that on some of the changes I still think 1 watt is the maximum if you have a fixed station and you have to meet a specific requirement for a fixed station having antennas literally mounted to the wall, they can't be like removable and the station has to be filled with the down and all that kind of stuff but again on the amateur side you get like 500 watts yeah 500 great right get yourself in trouble even with a license and then you share it with many other unlicensed users so that's kind of a negative in any situation that you have a bunch of unlicensed people on there and what they're going to do and what they're going to come up with so what can part 97 do high power 100 watts right that's pretty cool you can do a lot of fun stuff you can make your access point go really really far with 100 watts different antennas aftermarket homebrew you can pretty much do whatever kind of antenna you want and settle up make it build it tested whatever you want and then modify build transceivers and antennas and all that kind of fun stuff so there's a lot of different advantages with part 97 that you can do with HSMM versus regular part 15 operation so let's talk about the 25 mile rinking project here got about 10 minutes left so I'll try to get through these here as fast as we can oops okay so the 25 mile rinking project was for a bike ride that we did in the Dallas area and what it basically was is the stations of the stations cyclists were going to be biking over a 25 mile course starting down here on the left side this is the start and stop and then they're coming all the way up around this loop and then back down you can see the mile markers here in the middle so we had a couple of key stations here this is our first station right over here at start and stop we have the only retail in the middle and then the rest stop here is our farthest point out and so we had a total of 20 miles to go out through the course there, 20.93 25 if you count out to the end here so the home base was our N25 and 2 station conveniently located on the top of one of the more tailed buildings there in Richardson, Texas just outside of Dallas you can see as seen from the start stop this is the top of the more tailed building right there on the corner is where we had our access point and our main connection here's another view of it up here on the 16th floor we're right here on the corner this is kind of a satellite view of the setup that we had start stop over here, N25 NT and we actually had our internet feed coming from one of the other more tailed buildings so it was piping over the connection to the N25 NT station and this is typically what we had for our equipment we had a wrap 11 repackaged in a sprinkler box one of the outdoor boxes they actually work really good they're nice and fairly water tight pretty easy to knot the equipment in so we basically took wrap 11s and put them in but a sprinkler box is like that so here's the overall network design we had our main internet feed from the Eisen Center and it was going to the more tailed tower that was kind of our main internet uplink and then from there from the more tailed tower we were going out to the Army COE tower that we had access to and then we had these two remote ref stops and then we also had the start stop here that was connecting back and then we had two different mobile stations that were out there that were kind of independent of the network that were sending data back on the internet we had webcams included in some of these locations as you can see that the goal was to be able to get live video feeds back from those over the HSMM network back to the main start stop station as well as uploading the images to the internet this is a program that we used to do all the RF planning for it if you haven't used it, check it out it's called radio and mobile you basically put in your coordinates of where you want your first station to be and where you want your second station to be you put in your elevations and it will kind of graph it out and tell you if you're going to be able to make that connection it uses topography maps and be able to tell you if you need the station higher or lower so I've got a 300 foot station over here and a 200 foot station over here and you're 50 miles apart and you're sure the earth and all the other factors that play into that so you can see here all of our plans here to be able to see the NT5 and NT tower all the way down to the COE tower and we're able to make that connection so here's our LLS verification or line of sight verification this one's from the COE tower you can see this is the Moortale building here in the distance and this is from Rostop 3 so we do have line of sight the entire way which is very convenient for this it made it a lot easier for us to deal with the annual balloon fest that we do in Plano Plano, Texas that is a little bit more complex than this because we've got hundreds of balloons that huddle balloons that take off and we've got to track them all over and we've got different requirements this year that we've got sites all around the city that we've got to get connection to and stuff so it's a little bit different deal this time than the connection but these are the shots here to verify that we have line of sight back and forth this one's 20.93 miles back to the Moortale building this is the set up on the COE tower this side right here is the link station over to the Rostops this side over here is linking back to N25 and 2 here's one of our webcams and there's one of our guys up there KB5 and ML up on the tower doing some work again this is one of our WAP 11 bridge radios we've got set up here and you can see these poles that we've hooked it up to so we've got a huge unit with the antennas and everything that we then take up to the tower so we don't have to deal with the actual tower itself we can get all the spacing and stuff right on the ground first and then this is the webcam that we had up there in a nice controlable box so we could control the scan and pan and tilt of the webcam so this is our station out here at Westop 3 no line of sight from Westop we set up the little Moortale towers there and we had no line of sight from that actual spot so somebody happened to notice we did have it over here at this playground equipment in the far distance so we went over to the playground equipment put up the antenna on that and we were able to make a connection here putting the antenna up there and then we ran a CAT5 cable all the way back over to where the Westop was about 500 feet of CAT5 so it ended up working out just fine first and we were able to make that connection so the results of all this the internet gateway to NT5 and T worked it was all part 15 and it actually worked so that was a big success and we were able to get that out NT5 and T was a great location it was high enough, it was centrally located we had line of sight all the way around from all of our stations we were able to do that very easily Westops were able to connect to NT5 and T using part 97 so we were able to connect up through all the Westops in we did run into some routing issues and I wasn't actually out on the field for a good portion of that and some of those guys are radio guys they're not computer guys and so that's where we need this kind of group that knows the computer side to get into the radio side more and help these guys out because when it comes to routing issues they have no clue and so we ran into some various routing issues I suspect it was some translations with maths and things like that that they were doing but overall it was a success, next year when we do this we'll be able to do it even better, a little bit more efficient we'll be able to put a little bit less time into it just like our balloon festival we did it last year it was okay, it sort of worked this year it's going to be much better and we've got a lot bigger plans for it because we can improve on it each year the whole goal of doing these type of things is to prepare ourselves for emergency related events so when we do get called upon by government agencies and things like that to assist them we can go out and we have the skills and the abilities to be able to go out and do these kind of things but we need the developers like in this room to be able to develop software like radio mode to be able to do that kind of fun stuff the few people that are out there that know how to do this they can do it and some of them actually sell their software and make money on it so theoretically you could make money doing that otherwise you really was more kind of on the open source type deal where everything's free and open you could do that and develop software and do fun things I have a radio control program for this D700 and I'm not sure if the guys hear that word or not it's working okay, it's alright it could be a little bit better I suspect it's more of a time thing somebody just got to put the time down to actually remotely control the program but somebody with the right skills could really do that and make that thing screen and be able to do it right from the computer and control it and do all that kind of fun stuff so I'll put the car out to the developers here and say jump in the amateur radio and help us out so in conclusion, ham radio is more than just talking to some old guy halfway around the world although you can do that as we saw you can talk to people all over the place, Alaska and some of the other places that we talk to even in New York and what not so you can't carry on conversations with people all over everywhere it's a great hobby to be able to do that being its ham has its advantages you pick up the advantages of part 97 as well as some other things some states restrict your ability to have things like radar detectors in your car and police scanners and stuff like that if you have a ham license, guess what how about that fun stuff? because it's a radio receiver, right? it's receiving that radio transmission it's on a hobbyist, that's all it's for I promise so things like the radar detector and the scanner you can actually have those of course local laws you need to check those and verify that it's okay to have those kind of things in those areas IRL, APRS, HSM they're a lot of fun it's really easy to talk to people, really easy to find stuff out there's a lot of really knowledgeable people out there that can help you out and lots of different situations and getting licenses is not hard you might actually learn something if you're not familiar with other content in the licensing regiment you can actually go through and actually power pickups some good information if not, I frequently get on the radio if I'm trying to research something I'll get on and start talking to people and most people out there do just about everything you're running to everybody from nuclear engineers to guys that clean toilets for a living you're running to everything and you can talk to them about different types of environments they're doing things on their networks even facing the radio stuff with everything else and it's a lot of fun so I encourage everybody to get involved as much as they can so with that, that concludes my presentation this is my email address if you need a copy of the presentation, feel free to email me dc12 at britnesson.com or you could also put dc12 at kc7iib.com that'll also work and with that, I'll go ahead and open it up for any questions sure, the question was the safety ramifications in regards to power and especially higher power in the antennas there was a lot of issues with that I was an RFID technician for a while working on very high powered transmitters and I was required to wear a low RF device that would track my exposure for the day and it was reset, we reset it each day and when that alarm went off that meant I hit my half half level of that and so basically I had half as much time left or wait for the second alarm kind of a funny story, I was working out on installing a site out on a radar installation and it did a test fire on one of the radars it was a military base, the test fire on one of the radars and I've been there 5 minutes and my alarm instantaneously went off, so one little quick test fire and it was already half that is a major issue, there's a lot of problems with that, you can have a lot of issues I don't know about all the specifics but be very careful and make sure you read about what you do I had an incident with setting up a little directional antenna and was holding onto some things I shouldn't have been holding onto and we transmitted and it was only 50 watts and it moved me pretty good so yeah some stories with all kinds of stories about people getting burns and all kinds of things so RF is very very dangerous if you don't know what you're doing be very very careful so definitely be careful with high power stuff and do your research before you start plugging things and are getting close to it because it can have some definite long-term effects and I heard that for the first time in the conference I didn't realize that 2.4 gig was the resonant frequency 2.54 so apparently that can cause a lot of problems especially with 802.11 networks so definitely be careful with high power stuff yeah a couple of milliwatts would do it, I had a buddy that was using just a regular access point and for whatever reason he was outside his house hooking up an antenna under one of the eaves of the house in the rain, I don't know why he was doing this and he had it all plugged in and he was out there standing in the rain barefoot and he was hooking it to the metal eaves into the house and he just got a little bit of shock and he was just enough to give him a joke but he came to work and he says what the hell happened, he says I got this little thing I was like that was the RF energy from the access point and you were conducting right during the puddle of water you were standing in, so that's the problem with the pipe 15 operations is anybody can buy an access point and go out there and shock themselves so any other questions sure the question there was basically setting up a mesh type network a typical type network where you've got multiple nodes connecting and everything in HSM right now is pretty much the length so we can point the point kind of stuff back and forth so the question here is what do we do to connect multiple people in and kind of interconnect or there's some software on the commercial side that we have now like mesh AP and things like that that people can load up and create these mesh networks we need somebody to port that kind of stuff over to amateur radio and start using it there, HSM room is brand new it a 2011's fairly new and amateur radio just said hey wait a second that's on our frequencies we can start using this and they started moving some of that stuff over that's pulling from the commercial side so basically we need to take that information over there the commercial tools and bring them back over to the side so I've been giving the signal that's my time so if you have any other questions feel free to email me or catch me in the house afterwards thanks for coming to the talk