 Alright, here we go. Let's try this thing again. Anyway, what you see on the screen is the objective was to dramatically increase network stumbling coverage by providing line of sight as large as possible to all the targets in the area. The concept, use a high powered rocket as a boost platform for either an access point or small computer. At the peak altitude what happens is the parachute deploys. It comes out where there's a seam in the rocket. You can see it about three quarters way up to the top. And the next part of the plan was to establish a wireless distribution system linked from the rocket access point to a launch site access point. WDS stands for wireless distribution system. It's used by a lot of Wisp operators and it's simply a means to establish a dedicated AP to AP bridge connection. Once communication with the ground is established, we begin our net stumbling. Transmit results to the ground computer. Pretty much everything you'd get on regular net stumblers. This in this case is coming from site survey information on the access point. Other tests for redundancy. We decided not to put two access points in the rocket. We used actually a little iPad computer with many stumbler loaded on and captured data independently. The advantage of course is that if you shoot the rocket and you lose it, well your transmittal data was good. If you shoot the rocket and you get it back, well you got extra data you know. So either can happen. I've seen both happen. Now I'd like to go through what I was thinking about as far as the design considerations when I envisioned this rocket back in February. Component section is critical here because everything from the AP to the parachute has to withstand high G forces. It also has to fit in the body of the rocket. Very important. It's a five and a half inch diameter rocket. It was pretty hard to find components. I mean obviously a laptop won't cut it. I attempted. Yeah exactly. Additional redundancy was built in everything on this thing as if it can fail at will on a rocket. The launch vehicle initial design consideration was it had to be capable of boosting a three pound payload to an altitude of greater than or equal to one mile. Large enough to visually track and recover. I think you can see it. Engine thrust to weight ratio minimum five to one that means it can get off the launch pad. If you put a weenie engine in your big rocket you can just watch it sort of go up and do like this. And finally as I'm a member of triple E we're very safety conscious. We've kept rocketry legal in the U.S. It's still legal in the U.S. and we want to keep it that way. So we did this under all the government safety codes. Here it is. And yes America size does matter. A little bit about the Nike smoke. You may have seen the smoke at some of the military installations around the country. It was used for atmospheric research in the 1950s. It's prominent features. Nike smoke was named that because they had smoke generators and had a real dense smoke trail. The other characteristic of it which is notable is it has extremely large nose sort of a swollen nose cone. So good for electronics. One of you guys asked about the rocket specs a little earlier. This rocket was designed using a simulator called RockSim. With the weight and stuff on board the design altitude was 7800 feet. Lift off weight 18 pounds. The motor and Ellis Mountain L330 maximum thrust engine. That's 95 pounds and an 8.9 second burn time which is pretty much incredible for a high power rocket. I mean that baby just keeps burning and burning and burning. Finally the electronics had to fit in that 12 by 5.5 inch payload section which happens to be the little short section under the nose cone right there. Electronics considered. High power AP or computer plus a card. Had to be whoa. Glad we still have power. Okay. Electronics also has to fit in the payload section. Small enough to fit there in less than three pounds. Power was a big consideration. Batteries are very heavy devices. If you put something up in space or wherever then you can't have very big batteries on it because that adds every ounce to the takeoff weight. So we went with devices that work from 12 to 18 volts DC. Pulling no more than 100 milliamps. Pulls a lot of amperage then your batteries are pretty much shot in 5, 10 minutes or less. Other thing that the electronics had to handle was capable of at least 10 G's. Here's what we considered as far as putting in the nose of the rocket. An iPad handheld. I initially rejected this one but later bought into it because I found one on eBay. But these are expensive and basically what I did is using an old style iPad I plugged a PCM CIA card into it and it did have an external antenna jack then so I could hook it to the high gain antennas. The other consideration was I think Dell sells some computing tablets that were suitable. However 2,000 bucks probably not a good idea to put on top of your rocket. You may could see it vaporize in just a second or two. Laptops as my friend Nick Hopper says forget about it and it ain't going to happen. And in various access points. This is the winning access point. It happens to be a deliberate access point. Deliberate makes high power AP's. Coincidentally these are one of the biggest suppliers in the U.S. for the Wisp business. The specs for the access point supports 802.11 B and G. Output power 250 milliwatts on B, 100 milliwatts on G. Size and weight 5 by 7 inches fits perfectly in a 5.5 inch rocket. 12 ounces it's a Zenwell radio and there's the chip set. Has a bunch of advanced features on it. Primarily if we use the WebManage user interface and site survey. Also has supports encryption WPA, TQEP, WPA2. The onboard computer. I wanted not just an air to ground signal transmitter when I first designed this thing but also felt like I needed some redundancy to collect onboard data. In other words what if this thing went off and we didn't get any signal from it. That's a distinct possibility with something traveling like 3 to 500 miles an hour. So I found an old I-Pack on eBay and purchased it. Got my idea from a hacker whose name was Blackwave. He was very popular. He was at DEF CON back 2001-2003 timeframe. Many of you may recognize him for his purple hair and I believe he was part of the Irvine underground. He has vanished since 2003 so Blackwave thank you for your stumbling rig and the specifications. We don't know where you are but we really appreciate it for the rocket. Another piece of electronics on board the rocket near the top is called an Altec accelerometer and altimeter. Basically the accelerometer calculates altitude just based on inertia. The altimeter uses a barometric pressure sensor to calculate the altitude. Nothing to do with wireless however very critical as it's the instrument that happens to blow the shoot out of the peak altitude. Next we'll move on to the design of the antenna system. This is a big deal because I don't think a lot of people think about radio propagation in theory when they think of 802-11b wireless. You put it in a room, you got your access point, it works. But actually antenna design in 3D is quite a challenging engineering process. The other thing was getting an antenna small enough and having a radiation pattern that would fit inside the rocket. What we're looking for is to maximize the land coverage, minimize the sky coverage. There are no APs up there and get as many DBM out of this antenna as possible. We used an antenna that was called a circular polarized antenna and the reason we did this was that they're used for satellite systems and circularly polarized antennas are very immune to Doppler effects and fading for moving objects. This is what it looks like. If you want to know the difference, it's pretty simple. Vertically polarized is what you have on most of your access points at the house. It's just, hey, I'm vertical here, look at me and all the people you're talking to generally have the same antenna, which I got this little antenna sticking up at the back of my computer. A lot of wisp operators and heavy trees using something called horizontal polarization. In this case it goes on the horizontal beam. The reason for this, if you've got heavy tree cover, you can easily shoot underneath the trees or underneath the canopy and get a lot better transmission distance as a wisp operator. Finally, of course, you have the circular polarized. There are two types of circularly polarized antennas, right hand and left hand. That's a right hand spiral, which is what we use. You have to have a pair of these in order to make them work right. Theoretically, the way these things work is that the incidence angle, pretty much you can have any incidence angle of signal and the signal will not fade when it hits that spiral on a circularly polarized antenna. This antenna is located right at the separation point of the rocket that we'll see in your senior at the top. You may recognize this as one of, it's just a plain conference room antenna, actually, to put up in a big room like this right in the middle of the ceiling. The patterns you see are what microwave engineers and amateurs use to determine where is this thing going to transmit. Horizontal, of course, is like this, so it's going to cover the room. In this case, it's going to cover the floor above and the floor below because you can see it's got a couple null nodes to the top there and it's got actually the right and left is up and down with respect to the room. See if I've got a pointer here I can show you. Anyway, the up and down are the right and left hand lobes there and this particular antenna was hooked up to the iPad computer in the rocket. For the axis point, which was a lot higher powered, I decided to go with an 8 dB antenna. Again, it was circularly polarized. Reason for this was I wanted a big cone under the rocket with as high gain and as much signal as I could get because what happens on this in wireless distribution mode, Dave on his computer on the ground was talking to the rocket and then it was doing site survey going out in a cone shaped area underneath so that's what you're looking at here. It actually forms a cone underneath. Approximately 140 degrees, 70 degrees on each side coming down from the rocket. Antenna coverage. As you see, 140 degree cone underneath the nose cone pointing straight down and we're doing a few calculations here as far as the how far out it could go in the ground pattern. The math basic trig here, you're looking at 53.6 square miles. That's assuming an altitude of 7,800 feet. Next slide. Okay, thanks. Alright, so anyway, this is just the numbers filled in. Basically you got an 8 mile diameter circle here which if you do the math calculates to about 50 square miles. It's about all I could get with 8 dB. I'd like to do more, but you know, we need bigger rockets for that. So anyway, that's what we ended up with. Pretty good swath of ground. The next design consideration is the link budget. And link budgets, you put in how much antenna loss you got, you put in the transmitter power, you put in the receiver sensitivity, plug all these things into these fancy equations and it tells you, hey, number one, will your link work or not? You're actually going to see these access points. I mean, anybody can stand up with an antenna or put an antenna anywhere. It doesn't mean it's going to go a thousand miles, okay? I think you guys know this intuitively. This is just a formal way to calculate that. And it's used for, link budgets used for microwaves, fiber optics, just about everything by engineers. So we did, I calculated the reliability, the potential reliability for two links, one from the ground to the rocket and the other going out from the rocket to all the target access points. I got tired of plugging in equations on my calculator, so I found a cool site on the internet that would do this for me. It's called SwissWireless.org if any of you are interested in setting up your own WS business or whatever. Right here, hang on, let me blow this up. I can't see it on my slide. But the numbers here, basically for the transmitter, consider that as an access point target on the ground. The transmit output power would then be 50 milliwatts. Cable loss is actually calculated, I just plugged the number for the same cable loss I had on the rocket, which I figured you either. You probably got an antenna directly connected to your access point anyway. And average 3DB gain, pretty much anybody that's got one at home, you've got that much at least. The reception numbers, that's the 8 dB circular antenna on board the rocket. The cable loss on board the rocket and the receiver sensitivity, that's pretty good. That's the deliberate, you know, how sensitive it is, how much of a signal it can pick up. That's equivalent to an Orinoco card, if you have one of those. Next is the rocket AP to Wi-Fi targets. All the same calculations here, with the exception that we assume 3DB on both receiver and sender transmitters. That one went to the backup IPAC unit. As you can see here, for the 50-mile circle, it says on the bottom, link will be near theoretical limit, link performance will be bad. Well, we didn't really care about performance, we just cared about stumbling and CNE AP, so big deal. Software I used. The deliberate access point comes with a built-in web browser, which was cool because all we needed was Explorer, and we could contact the rocket, do anything we wanted to on the deliberate software. We used HyperSnap 6 as screen scrapes. Basically, we're catching the signal from the rocket and just doing screen scrapes on it. Net Stumbler 4.0 on the ground, Net Stumbler on board the IPAC on the rocket. Access point set up. Here you see that we set the little burn up for both B and G bands and set up as a wireless distribution system. That simply means that it's got a 50-50 operating ratio. It operates 50% of the time. It's just a dedicated bridge link to the rocket. It operates 50% of the time scanning the targets on the ground. Another setup screen here. This just shows the power settings. We cranked this thing up to maximum power before we launched it. Screenshot. This is actually near my house. This is not from on board the rocket, but a screenshot of the actual site survey function that we'll be using during the flight. This will set the auto update. It's got an auto refresh screen, so about every 10 seconds we get a fresh update from the launch vehicle. Stumbling plan at max altitude. The parachute deploys. Antennas are now in the proper position. In other words, this thing comes apart. Antennas pointing down. It's all hanging from the parachute. That gives us about, with the size parachute I used, six and a half minutes of stumbling time. The reason I put in here that the number of targets decreased with decreasing altitude is really true because think about it. If you've got a cone right here and the top of the cone is the rocket, it can come down, your cone is getting narrowly. It's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as the rocket descends. A few pictures of the construction. When I was putting this thing together back in February, I documented it. What you see on the bottom half there is the access point hooked to a board. Behind there is the actual altimeter and the space that the iPad, actually over top of it from your view, is the space that the iPad computer fit in. And that's just an ethernet cable hanging out of the payload bay there. This is the engine that went in the rocket. Unfortunately I couldn't ship it today. The fire marshal wouldn't agree. And the airlines weren't real hip on it either. So it is a house of an engine. This is bigger than most of the kid rockets that I shot. You can see the ruler there. It's about three feet long. And it's about two inches in diameter. That's a honking lot of ammonia per chlorate, which we rocketeers affectionately known as AP. The other thing about the rocket construction and the reason I picked the Nike Smoke is the nose cone functions as an antenna radome. For you guys that don't know what a radome is, it means that it's transparent to radio waves at a given frequency. You've probably seen these at some of the government ground stations and stuff that are known as golf balls, the big enclosures. Well, those are made like that for a reason. They protect the antennas from the wind and stuff. And the signal gets through. This is just a picture of that. If you look about between, well, actually on the horizontal axis of 2.4 gigahertz, this particular nose cone is made out of Teflon fiberglass, which is, as you can see, lost transparent. And that's what it looks like, what you see up here on the front of the stage. After I found my eye pack on eBay, I decided that, since I only had one big honking engine for the large Wi-Fi rocket, I like to shoot this at some other locations. So I just happened to have an older rocket that I built back about 2000. And I said, this will be good because I can get some smaller engines and we can do some shooting and some more places to get some more data. So we added what's called a PML Patriot missile. It's capable of boosting an eye pack to 2,000 feet. It can be launching much smaller fields legally and in more densely populated areas because you can shoot it, for instance, in a city kind of park where there's trouble with the law. This enabled three launch sites that we did for this project. The big one was in Culpeper, Virginia. The next one was in Centerville, Maryland, and the third was about two miles north of UVA campus in Charlottesville, Virginia. And that's just the other two launch sites that I just mentioned. There's what the Patriot looks like. It's a lot smaller than this, but did a good job. Now I'm going to turn this over to one more thing. I got this thing up in Culpeper back on July 24th. You actually have to get FAA approval for anything over 2,000 feet. So we had to call in and clear the airspace over Culpeper before we set this puppy off. And my triple E friends, it pays to have friends in high places because my triple E friends all helped me out with this. Now, with that, I'd like to introduce my friend, Matt Hatter here. He also, his name's Dave, and he also works as a security engineer for Tenacity Solutions. He was instrumental in helping me get this project off the ground. He's worked with the start and been at every launch, and basically he's in charge of all the ground electronics. And so with that, Dave's going to show you a video. The first part of the video you'll see is going to be the little rocket we shot for fun, and the next will be the big one, followed by sort of a slow motion slide show. And I think you guys will find pretty interesting. Take it away, Dave. T-minus five, four, three, two, one. Okay, go, Mike. Ready, two, three. T-minus five, four, three, two, one. Come on. I just lost the words. It's in these online clouds again. It's going to be dropping down here shortly. I'll run. At least you know where it's at. There it is. Right there. We're going out to go look for it here. It's staying out of the clouds now, Mike. This was a big honk and zoom lens. It's actually out a couple miles. We had to walk about a mile to go find it, searching through the farms that surrounded the launch site. There was a spike over the corner. We found it in somebody's front yard, about 200 yards from the front of their front door. So the family dog was extremely excited. It's kind of what tipped us off to the location of the landing site. The dog was doing a loopy. He drew on those cones? He probably didn't lick the mud off there. Let's go over between them. That's a hell of a thing to take the mud around. All right, here we go. All right, so what you're looking at here are the results of the rocket shoot. Well, hang on. What you're looking at here are the results of the rocket shoot. The rocket went to 6,800 feet. This data is from the onboard accelerometer altimeter. That's that big red curve you see there. You see deploy detected, which is where the parachute came out. The blue is it achieved 367 miles per hour going up. The other piece of information we got from the altimeter is that 6G is on takeoff. So that's the actual flight data. And here are the stumbling results for a cold pepper. The default is the only access point that we picked up off the deliberate access point. However, I do want to point out this was picked up at an altitude of over 6,000 feet. We know that because we were taking snapshots as the rocket went vertically. It took off at exactly 10.32 a.m. And that file, which is snap 01257, happens to be about 26 seconds in the flight. So that's how we figured out the altitude that came up. We did pick up another access point, which is from the I-PAC. Tell you what, just get into the backup slides. All right. The other, here's a net stumbler from the same cold pepper shoot. We picked up a link sys at 2,000 feet. The other shots we did, this is the Maryland side farm launch. And here are the APs we picked up there. Keep in mind that this is from rural America. Most of these access points that we're seeing are on big farms and they're way out where there is no. There is no DSL. There is no cable system. There's nothing out there. These are access points that were none of which were visible from the ground before we shot the rocket. The final launch here was at Culpeper. I'm sorry, Charlottesville. We picked up a lot more... I'm going to show you a Google Earth of these in just a second. We picked up a lot more access points in Charlottesville. This was a much smaller city park. It's about two miles north of the UVA campus. Unfortunately, the last rocket shoot, which was on the smaller Patriot rocket, rocket went up about 200 feet in the air, flipped over, it was a little too side heavy and also a wind that day cocked into the wind and went sideways for about half a mile and ended up in the woods. So that was quite a trek for me to get. Unfortunately, antenna pointing down in the ground as the rocket flies horizontally is probably not the best configuration to have. So now back to the... let me show you the Google Earth stuff. This is the Culpeper launch site and what I want to... let me give my pointer out here. What I'd like to show you is where we took off from and where we ended up. The Culpeper site, the launch field is right there. That's where we launched from and where we ended up was way over here near a house, about two miles away. That's a big trek you saw us doing through the cornfields and stuff. I mean, this thing was way out there. In fact, this field is huge. I think this is at least a thousand acre farm and we ended up in this ladies' backyard, which, you know, the dog wasn't at all happy. The next launch site we did was on the Maryland side farm. Some of you rock tree guys may know this. This is MD at Maryland Delaware Association of Rock Tree Launch Site. The actual side farm is right through here. That's where we took off from and we ended up... it's a very small rocket, ended downwind in that field right there. So again, you know, what I'd like to point out here is that you've got a very few houses. If you look closely down through this region there are a couple houses and up through here. This area here is not actually housing. That's like different crops and stuff. And I do know for a fact that there aren't any... there are no DSL or any kind of cable or anything in this area. So that's your 50 square mile circle, which we picked up. Charlottesville Virginia Launch Site. There has to be a city park. Hard for me to see right here, but it happens to be a city park about right through this region here. There's a big clear field, actually right here. The rocket took off there, ended up 200 feet on its side and ended up in these woods right here. As you can see, UVA campus is down through here. That was a target-rich environment. Unfortunately, wind didn't corroborate that day and I didn't get much data. I got seven, two on the ground, seven in the air. You know, we had to call it a day unfortunately, but I was hoping for a slew of access points there. Here's the overall results. Cold pepper, we found two APs. One detected at 2,000 feet by the IPAC unit. Zero visible at ground level. Maryland Launch Site. Of course, all we had was the IPAC onboard there. That was three APs. Again, none visible on the ground. And in Charlottesville, Virginia, we had seven access points and then only an altitude of 200 feet, if that, sideways. People with much more security constant in Charlottesville, just about everybody. I had a stay-out access point. I have all kinds of weapon encryption going there. So obviously, rural America's prime target if you can find them, but you wouldn't find these by war driving. We got five minutes. Okay, so the conclusion is wireless access points are scarce in rural America. Most are fed by VSATs, which are the same thing as Directway, small satellite dishes. War Rockets picked up target APs in both the remote Maryland and Virginia sites, the rural sites. None were visible on the ground. Go ahead. Pros of war rocketing, advantage, looking hard to find satellite-based APs, possible military uses. I know for a fact that the government does this with much bigger and better stuff, million dollar plus. We did it for a thousand bucks, basically, including all the electronics. Potential applications, targeting Ben Lytton, Mel Gibson, whoever he hates, AP. You fill in the blank. Number two, you live in Wyoming and always suspected there was that Starbucks cafe just over the next ridge. And number three, why drive when you can fly? War rocketing kinds. It's expensive. Propellant costs $35 for the little rocket. It costs $200 for the big one to go up once. Pair-shoot time. Yeah, okay. You got to get pretty high and you got to have a pretty hefty shooter. You're not going to get too much stumbling time. Electronic size and weight. Ultimately, you need a bigger and bigger rocket to boost more sophisticated equipment. Safety requires large recovery area. Downtown Manhattan's probably not a good location. Keep in mind any of you guys wanting to get into this. It can be a very dangerous hobby. It's a very fun hobby. But there was one story when Triple E first started of it was near a trailer. This particular launch site was near a trailer and the rocket, the parachute failed to come out. This thing becomes what's called a ballistic missile when the parachute fails to come out. Went through the roof of the trailer, actually impacted their kitchen table and buried itself right in the middle of the kitchen table. Fortunately, it didn't injure anybody. But keep that in mind. If you want to do a rocket, do it safely. Do it legally. Next. Future work. What I wanted to do this rocket, but I didn't have enough vertical space on it, was put a long sector antenna. You guys have probably seen them on cell towers. They go up to 12 to 18 dB, which would buy you about 450 square miles. A lot bigger target area. Unfortunately, my rocket was not quite tall enough for that. Maybe next year. Also, GPS is a nice addition and a nice small circuit board. We can actually start to track things. And as the antenna rotates, the idea was to have this antenna pop out of the rocket and just sort of do this like the radar mask you see on a ship, just sort of rotate coming down, which would give us targets all over the area. Next. Lesson learned. Laptops and sunshine do not mix. Dave had a hell of a time. I had a hell of a time. You almost have to have incredible vision with a laptop and the bright sun. Rockets without parachutes on ballistic trajectories are dangerous to your health. Number three, very true. If it can fail, it will. Shooting rockets is a lot like gambling in Vegas. Don't launch anything you're not prepared to lose. And finally, once you push that launch button, you're pretty much done. Here are the websites that were listed and any of you guys interested in the equipment, the other stuff we used. Next. Everybody, particularly Dave Cantrell for all his help at every launch and the ground computers and a whole tenacity crew, as you see a lot of my teammates here helping me out with the video editing, graphics, weather, and the other guys I'd like to thank are Ben Russell and Mike Showalter who are big into triple E rocketry and cold pepper, and Caleb of Deliberant Systems. Next. Those are some of the things if you want to do research about this later you can look up. It's on the Defcon CD. And that's about it. I'll take questions now. Thank you. Yeah, the question we have is, is there any insurance policy? If you join triple E, you don't have to worry about insurance because we got our own team of lawyers and our own insurance for all the launch sites. Very, very important. Because as you know, if you kill the guy's corvette next door, he's going to be a little pissed off. Anybody else? Yeah, go ahead. Say again, was I still transmitting? Yeah, it was still transmitting. We had a hard time. We had an omni antenna actually looking which did the link. So we really didn't need to aim the antenna. The hard time you see us tracking is Dave trying to hold the camera to see this thing about two miles away. He was doing this freehand without a tripod. Say again, post impact recovery? Oh, well. It fell down in a very... For number one, it was behind the house so you couldn't see the signal. It actually landed behind a suburban house which was not supposed to happen. It was supposed to land out in an open field. That's why we couldn't pick up a signal from it. Yeah, we did have mobile stumbling gear. We couldn't pick it up because I'm assuming that the house was blocking most of the signal. Go ahead. Oh, absolutely. Tether, weather, balloon, people. I think Dave even mentioned model RC planes and stuff like that. Absolutely. I just happened to be in a rocketry and it seemed like a cool thing to do. Anybody else? If not, I thank you all for coming today and I'll have the rocket in the next one of the free areas over here. You guys come by and I'll show you the insides of it. Thank you very much.