 Our next presentation is one of the people who's helping run the event and has been just doing these factories He and Charmander the ones who figured out how to bypass the Press slide presentation snafu and get it working and that's giggly out Giggly I was going to talk to us about ham radios not just for dinosaurs like me Why hackers use need an amateur radio license and I have to agree with him Despite the fact that I'm an agent I have to ruin very things are giggly. Oh, it's a forensic and threat analyst security engineer And med impact healthcare systems There goes work in the staffing manufacturing mortgage and healthcare industries each providing unique insights into how critical information She needs to be protected. Giggly was fortunate to be on the team that hosted the 2020 deaf con groups the our event and it's looking forward to the 2022 event as well as I am too. So here you go. Can you go there take it away? Can you hear me? Okay Perfect, okay so I got a Sure, I can see my slides without face-noy from everybody. So so the purpose of my talk is Talk about ham radio and for a lot of people and radio may conjure up images of You know old retired guys sit talking into a microphone Their buddies across the country Talking about the weather and different things. That's certainly a component As time has gone by it used to be all analog There's lots of different frequency ranges and stuff. Also our Things people are aware of, you know, big emergencies where things happen infrastructure collapses a lot of times ham radio operators Are able to get Information in and out of a place that doesn't have another way to do it a lot of that's changed nowadays I mean we have satellites and satellite phones and that kind of stuff. So to some extent there's a certain amount of You know legacy I think in some people's heads related to the ham radio Amateur radio world Which you know that could be valid There's and I'm setting you up for where I'm gonna take you so hang in there Don't get bored and run away because it isn't as bad as it sounds The there's other things components of that Aries on the member of Aries It's the amateur radio emergency service. They coordinate with hospitals and things Using different technology stacks in the event of an emergency There's a tool called the wind link Which is a piece of software you run on your laptop But behind it there are forms all kinds of forms think of a hospital any kind of form They would need to fill out and send to somebody far away There's all these forms that exist different levels of technology Over RF it's over the internet etc. So So so there's definite good stuff on the legacy ham radio side if you will And but the thing that's really the kicker now, let me get to where I can hit the button If I can do that with a microphone on my hand, how do you do that? Let's see So here's the here's the thing if you're a Hacker and all of us in this room are hackers. We are Usually, you know, like X-ray said usually on the bleeding or hemorrhaging end of technology Cool thing is if you think about it, we've talked about, you know, people doing shenanigans with different things How you want to be also that you can you can experiment you can do things you're not, you know Playing with things that you shouldn't playing with and then are hoping that nobody catches you In it. Well, if you think about it, if you want to experiment with radio frequency And the the higher bands there. So hopefully this slide is readable But there's there's these different bands over on the right hand side different gigahertz ranges of things you head up into microwaves There's all kinds of digital communication modes now that didn't used to be the case And guess what all it takes to do it legally is to get your amateur radio license Make sure you stay in your lane meaning stay in the bands that are allocated For amateur radio use and you're golden as long as you don't like fry your neighbors TV set or something And there are rules and things you learn about, you know Maximum effective radiated power and how much does it transmit through skin? Ionizing versus non-ionizing radiation all these kinds of things So that you know what's safe, you know, you don't put a 1500 watt antenna right next to your neighbor's house that kind of stuff Most of it is pretty common sense tiny bit of math. It's pretty easy and So then now you have access to all these frequencies and now you may say, okay cool But you know, what am I gonna do there? So the other part of it is there are folks One group is the open research Institute and the person. Let me back up here because I got there The person that's the co-founder and CEO of the open research and just instituted Michelle Thompson There's also a DC 8 5 8 member also a ham radio operator and Their purpose is to introduce technology It's Been research right that one of the challenges even a newer newer newer technology, let's say for amateur radio There a lot of it is driven by the vendor, right? You've got Yesu, you've got Kenwood. You've got all these different manufacturers. They make They build code that goes with it. It is a thing that takes, you know Audio data, let's say or digital data and turns it into a stream that you can analog transmit over the airwaves And then they wrap that into something that you can't use it unless you buy the licensing from them Have to use that and I'll you know go down that road. So what uh, Michelle's Open research Institute here is a way to make things open And so, you know open source that kind of a thing so everybody has access to the code act or everybody has access to plans on how to make something Or whatever the project is one of the other really cool things Down here on the regular regulatory tab It says work covers itar year degree mitigation and more Now, I'm you know, I'm not the wizard here, but itar as I understand it is A international governing body on things that are considered You know what like war related or military or weapons and through pivotal work that michelle and the ori group did they were able to get things related to What we're talking about here classified as non Hey, hang on. I Hey giggle when you turn your head. I think you're trying to away from your mic So, I thought uh, I thought as soon as I picked up the mic. I had megaphone for life I thought I thought you might be pulling it away from your your head physically. No No, I'm wearing a headset. How's that? Is that any better? I believe drop the mic when you change the slides earlier. It fell on the floor Yeah, I know agreed. Um, hopefully so, but I don't need to hold the mic, right? And then I still okay. We need to hold the mic Okay, excellent. So then I I will hold the mic and then try to see if I can go net. So how much did you guys miss with me talking to the wall there? How far should I back up? We can hear you. It's just difficulty here. So we can hear it all this. It's not as loud and there is Okay It's better now open host tools And the third one down is a megaphone if you Turn the megaphone on you don't need to hold the mic I cannot turn it on for you because you have more permissions than I do so I can't force your permissions to do anything That's fine. I turned it on so let's see if it stays stuck So so yeah, the cool thing they were able to get the work that's being done by the ori and specific codex Like we're talking about the m17 codex different things They were able to get those classified as non On export control, I guess And which is awesome because that sets the the groundwork for going down the road into the future The various projects and not getting entangled by somebody who's trying to throw a wrench in the works So check out open research dot institute And you can see all the different projects they got going on And now I'll bore you with a little bit of ham radio stuff to show you how straightforward it really is to get a license Oh There we go So depending on how much everybody knows about Let me turn if I can see my own deck here So some background. What is radio? What is frequency and what is spectrum? and Oh Radio is using an alternating current to modulate a signal sending it into a wire think of an antenna Which then leaves the antenna is an electromagnetic magnetic wave Into space or air if you will The frequency which is how it's measured is the number of oscillates the oscillations per second And then spectrum is the range of frequencies that can be allocated And so you can see on the chart here, which I forget who I stole from It's got everything from, you know, your real people you have to really say dc the light and the And those That spectrum and I'm hearing somebody eating so I don't know if we're gonna figure out who's jumping away there The so that's that So here's um next slide Well ham radio is the amateur radio service, which we talked about already It's licensed by the FCC. So that's who you participate with you need a license to transmit Now you can hopefully a lot of us have played with the sdr inexpensive, you know software to find radio dongles and software Let's you you can listen to anything You know within limits and then but to transmit you have to have a license Frequencies are allocated by usage and over on the right. There's a chart that's showing different Bands they call them in the amateur radio service. And then there's a thing called a banned plan That's who's allowed to transmit on what frequencies The most part amateur radio frequencies are shared with somebody So if if there's like a public service a commercial service or something else It's out there in the in a similar or nearby frequency range If you end up transmitting and mess up their Signal so they can't do what they're supposed to do You're going to be the one that gets told you need to tone it down less than the power move the antenna Kind of stuff. So now what's interesting is a high-end frequencies that we were looking at earlier Some of those are exclusive to the amateur radio service, which is a godsend for experimenters and folks doing cool stuff There's different license classes and At this point the entry level license class is a technician license Which is a very straightforward to get You have to There's a tiny bit of math and most of it you can memorize or if you test prep You can learn understand and do the recognition thing versus having to break out a calculator and compute things Um technician class is authorized to transmit on vhf uhf and microwave frequencies And then the banned plan we talked about technician test is easy. So Good there. Let's go here And is this my let's see a little bit Oh taking the test. Yeah, there's different test prep methods. You can take the test in person You can take it online, which is what I did I always wanted to get a ham radio license And but back in the day when I first looked at it Knowing how to send and receive morse code was a requirement And I just never had the time to get in there and figure it all that out Nowadays, that's not a problem Oh, this is the basic steps you would go through which may be a little more minutiae than we all need But you study for the test register for your frn And then that goes on a website And you sign up with a testing body to go take the test And that can be online with glarg. That's who I used You pay your test or pay your fees take your test And then assuming you passed you get assigned a call sign And the other cool thing you can do is you can go look for call signs That are in disuse so to speak they call that a vanity sign Or sometimes in the case of say you have you know a parent and a child or a family relation and a younger family relation And that person is no longer either actively transmitting. They're not using their license or maybe they passed away And the family relation would like to be the keeper of that license You can sign up with the FCC And assuming nobody else has tried to get that license for whatever reason You can apply for it. And now you might have your uncles or your aunts or whoever's Ham radio license number You can now legally transmit on allocated bands And like I mentioned before go check out open research Or yeah open research dot institute And you can see what projects that got going on are also interested in having people contribute Um, you know, there's a whole lot of smart people in this room So I'm sure there's something out there you would take a look at and say hey, that's kind of cool Let's let's go explore that And to complete my meme thing so on the first slide we had you know Ham radio isn't just for dinosaurs So now we're going to have any questions By our space going dyno there So if anybody's got a question holler it out or track me down And we can talk about stuff This can be a dry topic but it also can be an exciting topic depending on You know where your project interests lie and so forth So gigo, what separates the technicians? I've actually been doing some of the ham study app stuff for the technician app or for the technician exam What makes the higher level ones a lot more difficult to obtain like what separates them? Well, so what I did I'm a general class Which is the one up above technician So I went and took the technician like test because I was like I just want to go see what's going on here Some people go on there and take two or three at a one I didn't have that much time to commit or try to keep things You know stuck in my head long enough really what the difference technician has a list of things There's a certain amount of relationships of you know If a frequency range is this how big is the antenna for a half wavelength or a quarter wavelength or whatever And so you figure out the math. I mean you're already doing you know binary math I think you could take a number and divide it into or by 300 and and do okay, right? So it that's pretty straightforward general class had a few more specific things I'm trying to remember what some of those were And then the next one is is it extra advanced extra? I can't remember what the one after general is Yeah, that one's got it's extra Extra. Yeah, I'm a god. Hey, thanks. I need that The that one has more Math and then I also saw a thing from One of the guys on the def the dc 858 slack was There was a topic being kicked around and they had an answer And it's like hey, that's because I'm studying for extra and a lot of it could be policy It could be things you're allowed to do what you know a given band range is shared by What like the the the 220 megahertz the 1.25 meter band the low end of that is actually shared by Old-school paging services and things and so there you could end up with a test question that says You know what part of the 1.25 meter band are you not allowed to use? And then you'd have to recognize which of them it is and it would be the one on the low end Oh, I don't know if that's a good enough thing. I've got a couple of different Test prep book things that I found that I can recommend They're they're pretty good. So you don't have to go out there and You know, and I'm not trying to suggest that hey, you're going to be an mcse by reading the cliff notes But it's more focused how you how to study what the study what to recognize and then what you have to calculate It's really based on other tests. I'm sure everybody in the room is taken. This is a pretty darn easy Awesome. Thank you And also Guide you can get for studying for the test I didn't even use that one. So x-rays telling me to make sure I mentioned the American radio relay league Guide to studying for the tests which I ended up not using which is probably pretty complete and useful Um, I was just a path. I didn't I didn't go down But the ARRL is also kind of the governing body besides the FCC of all things ham radio And uh, and there's there's also local groups just You know similar like local DEF CON groups Uh, I'm in the San Diego area. So there's the Palomar Amateur radio club and they run repeaters and things that uh, you know, we're up on high mountains So if you're in a good place geographically, you can talk to folks nearby not so nearby Uh with you know, just a handheld or something simple You don't have to be the person with the 30 by 40 foot, you know Big beam antenna on a hundred foot tower pointing off into faraway places Do you do anything with emergency services yourself or? Yeah, I do. I am a part of Aries amateur radio emergency service They just had a thing a couple weekends ago on the Dude using wind link with hospitals They said and they they you know, if you think about doing a tabletop exercise They're doing a tabletop exercise, but they're doing it real with You know fake data fake Fake transactions and things and so everything they get sent out as to have a Drill header on it so that it doesn't get acted on Um, but yeah, there's lots of amateur radio service I think there's also and you could probably talk to a better x-ray. I've heard of mars, which is military related and is in a slightly different frequency range from some things But you know and some of these services may or may not still be out there. I can't remember A mars is a military affiliated radio station. It's um our amateur radio station The I briefly worked at the mars station at treasure island during vietnam and they work in conjunction with The amateur radio people and one of the things that they would do is set up phone patches like the vietnam So people put in the states could actually talk to people in in vietnam So I can talk to their loved ones. It's really it's really cool A lot of fun. Yeah Yeah, once once you get it in into Amateur radio space and you find frequency ranges or things. There's kinds of different protocols I'm kind of a low power guy. So I'm I'm not going to try to put some giant antenna up But I with a random wire around my backyard and a little I think it most it puts out as maybe 10 watts There's a protocol called ft8 And there's software reading written by smart folk And you load the software up and I was able to hit japan I hit, you know bullies There are monitoring stations around the world that feed back and I even saw my signal being picked up by something in ant arctica That doesn't mean there would have been enough signal there But these this protocol ft8 is made for very weak very low level Stuff going on. So there's a lot of cool stuff to play with And the the only other thing about amateur radio for the most part is not allowed to send encrypted traffic For the most part if you're sending information The protocol has to be known and the folks that may or may not You know that that are listening Um, it would need to know that that's something or at least if you want to be in compliance That your your whatever traffic you're carrying isn't encrypted With the only exception being and this is what that one test question was other person remembered Uh control signals that run some kind of remote Vice that's up on a mountaintop. Those are okay to be encrypted. So somebody doesn't take it over. Anyway, it's a whole lot of blah blah blah I should relinquish the stage Thanks everybody They turned off megaphone We're running a little ahead of schedule. It looks like the it's the next talk going to be here. It's Uh Now four o'clock. So we've got uh about an hour so Feel free to walk around talk people get something to drink, uh for the bathroom Talk to people that's a novel thing to do at a conference designed for people to talk to each other so Yeah, and ask questions if you see speakers. You got questions. Feel free to ask them questions and we'll see you back here at uh, let's see it's Las Vegas it'll be 4 p.m. Las Vegas time for our next presentation which will be by Uh jabbles on poning lazy admins So that should be an exciting talk because there's a lot of lazy admins out there. So there must be a lot of fun things to talk about