 Mae'r gair yn ymwneud, yn ymwneud. Mae'r gair yn ymwneud. Mae'n amhwytoedd yr operator. Mae gynhyrch yn ymddiolol yw Golff 7. Iel pan oedd ymddiolol Llema Fox. Charlie. Mae'r Rhubet. Mae'r ffordd i'r gynhyrch bydd ymddiol fe fyddai'r gynhyrch i'r gynhyrch ar ysgolion yng nghydroliidd a'r gynhyrch yn ymddiol ymddiolol. Mae'r gynhyrch yn ymddiol m6. Mae'r gynhyrch yn ymddiol. Mae'n ddiwedd i'r cwrtholi cwp am ystod yma i amlwg, y trofodol yn fwy o'r prydau cwp, mae hynny'n ddod yn ysgrif iawn ar y cwrtholi cwp, mae hynny'n ddod yn ddod yn fwy o amlwg ymlaen i amlwg ymlaen i amlwg ymlaen i, ac mae'r amlwg ymlaen i amlwg ar ymlaen i amlwg. Y rydd ymlaen i'r cymaint o'r wlad wedi'u gwybodol ymlaen i'r internet, Byddwch yn ddweud eich bod y bau o'r amser o amserio. Mae'r amserio yw yn ddweud o'r amserio gwneud o gwybodol cymdeiniedig iawn o teimlo gyda'r cymhwyllt yng Nghymru. Ond yn ddweud y gallwn yn ddweud o'r amserio gwneud o'r amserio gwneud o'r amserio gwneud. Yr problem yw... Yn ymgyrch, rydyn ni'n meddwl i chi ddweud o'r amserio. A ydych chi wedi gweithio i gyd y gweithio, yn ddweud i ddiwrnod a'r mynd i'r gweithio. So, we're watching TV on it at home, we're doing our banking on it, we're maintaining security systems, we're using voice communications at home and some of us are even running internet based software so we're running things like web mail, we're running things like Google Docs and things like that for all our word processing. So, we rely on the internet for an awful lot of our everyday lives. Now, the problem with the internet is that it's not reliable. How many people have BT as their internet provider? Only a few. A couple of weeks ago BT's hubs went down and the vast majority of BT internet customers couldn't get access to the internet. For them, that meant no watching TV. It meant no email access. For young people like Rebecca, it meant no getting on the internet and doing the stupid chatting they do over the internet with their mates. Life was destroyed for two days while BT got themselves back on the air. But it's not just us at home who are affected by these sort of things. Does anybody recognise this photograph? Anybody know what it was? Sorry? Yeah. But 2009, we lived up in Lancashire, we're very, very close to Cumbria. In 2009, Cumbria was absolutely deluged with heavy rain and things like that. And many, many bridges got taken out. And what you can actually see in that particular video is strung across the actual bridge are a lot of wires. Now, some of those are support wires for those three little guys trying to actually get across the water there. Others of them are electricity cables, communications cables and internet infrastructure. The problem was that an awful lot of the communications for Cumbria was wiped out when these bridges went down. And that didn't just affect us at home. It didn't just affect businesses. More importantly, it actually affected the emergency services because most people don't realise that when a police officer gets on his radio, he's not talking direct to the police station or anything like that. He's talking to the local mast and then his voice communication goes over the internet to police headquarters where it gets dealt with. So when things like this happen, then the actual emergency services can't communicate either. And they don't have a backup. There is no backup for this failure in communications. This is actually just outside Cockermouth. This is one of the big bridges that went down. But there was lots and lots of bridges carrying infrastructure like this that actually went down. Now, we specialise in wireless communications, which means we don't rely on the internet. We're communicating point to point through the air, through the ionosphere, etc. So we're not actually involving the internet in any of our communications. Our communications can be the local or it can be long distance. Right, now there we go. Unfortunately, this was done in PowerPoint. This was done in PowerPoint and it doesn't work terribly well in free software unfortunately. Sorry, we just need to do a quick reboot. Sorry, do apologise. Now, frequency is a measurement of how fast things move. So if I wave my hand two times a second, I'm actually waving my hand at what they call a frequency of two hertz, two times a second. And that's exactly if I was to be able to wave my hand at say 20 times a second, then some people would actually be able to hear the sound where the actual waves, the disturbance that's actually created. Because that's at the bottom of our human hearing frequency. So anywhere between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz, a good hearing person could be able to hear it. And that's literally air vibrating and that's how speakers work. If you actually vibrate a speaker cone at 10,000 times a second, that's actually generating audio frequency tone of about 10 kilohertz. Those of you who are musically orientated will recognise what middle C is. That's actually got a frequency of about 261 hertz. Now these are frequencies that we can hear. So any frequencies, anything that's vibrating the air and things like that around us between these frequencies, we can actually hear. But above that, above those frequencies, we've actually got radio frequencies. Now these are frequencies that we can't hear. But these are frequencies that can carry information through the air and through the ionosphere around the actual world. And we've got six main bands to actually use and these are split up with these particular frequencies. Now these numbers might not make much sense to you. But if we actually replace them with actual descriptions, so those of us who are old enough to remember what longwave is, or cricket fans, any cricket fans amongst us listening out on the cricket on Radio 4 on longwave, so they're the low frequencies. Then we move up to the medium wave frequencies, which are the things like Rebecca listens to on Atlantic 252 or whatever it is, pop music from Southern Ireland. She's moved on, she's on the internet. Then we move up into shortwave radio, what people recognise as shortwave radio, where we've got worldwide broadcasts and things like that. Up to the VHF frequencies, which are what we use for ordinary FM radio, Radio 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. Up into the UHF frequencies, which is where television and mobile phones sit. And then up into the super high frequencies, which is where your microwaves sit. So these are all the radio frequencies that we've got available to us. Now the thing with radio waves is they travel along the actual ground. So when we're transmitting here, we'll get radio waves that travel actually along the ground. And the lower frequencies will actually travel further. So very high frequencies, like the ones generated by this handheld, will probably travel maybe five miles around here. If I get up on a hill, I might be able to get 75, 80 miles out of it. But if I was using much lower frequencies, then those signals would actually travel further. So the lower the frequency, the further those radio waves will actually travel. Now they don't just travel along the ground. They also go out into the air, into the air around us and the atmosphere around us. Now sitting above us about 50 kilometres is something called the ionosphere, which is a dense level of gases. And the low frequencies will actually bounce off this ionosphere. And you can actually see in the diagram there, there's actually the red line. That's a low frequency, sort of frequency that we're transmitting on in the tent outside with the big vertical antenna. And those signals will actually hit the ionosphere, bounce back down to Earth, and anybody in the zone where that signal hits the Earth can actually receive the signal. Sometimes that signal will actually bounce back up again into the ionosphere and we'll actually get what we call multiple hops. So we can actually transmit right the way around the world using multiple hops. The VHF signals, the highest signals unfortunately, they actually pass right the way through the ionosphere so they don't get reflected. So these sort of signals that are generated by these transmitters, they won't get bounced around the Earth, they'll go straight out into space. So I guess if you're sitting on the next shuffle to Venus in about 60 years, you may well be able to hear some of us amateur radio operators calling CQ. That's not an issue though because what we do have is we've got satellites. So those VHF signals that actually pass through the ionosphere, they can actually get reflected by satellites. So we can actually reflect those as well, but we're using an artificial reflector satellite to actually bounce the signals back down to Earth. So this is what we as amateur radio operators do and this is why we call it communicating around the world without the internet. The internet is always seen as the modern must-have piece of technology for communication. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work and this is a fallback system and this is what a lot of amateur radio operators experiment with. So not all amateur radio operators are geniuses. I'm certainly not a genius. However, a lot of amateur radio operators experiment with wireless communications. So they'll experiment with normal radios. They'll experiment by developing wireless communications and technology systems. So they'll create their own kind of thing and experiment to see if it works so that they can fine-tune it to create it and make sure it's even better. They'll use wireless to communicate with other amateur radio operators around the world. So if there was someone in like Brazil, you could speak to them. Where did we get? We got to... The furthest we transmitted to yesterday, HF conditions weren't brilliant, the furthest we got yesterday was Greece and Turkey. But if conditions are brilliant, you can get to Brazil, America, places like that. And there's lots of different areas of amateur radio so you can vocally talk to people. You can do keyboard to keyboard, so basically type into people. You can use satellites to bounce off and enhance your signal. You can use Morse code, which is basically a series of dots and dashes that are formed to create words, numbers and sentences. A lot of people actually think Morse code is a very old-fashioned method of communication but it's actually on the way out. Certainly the military have stopped using it. They made a policy many years ago stop using it. However, they're very slowly reintroducing it because they've now realized that when the satellites go down, when the internet goes down, nothing actually gets through better than Morse code. What you will find when you listen into HF signals is voice signals get very easily distorted and it's really difficult to actually hear what somebody's actually saying. Listening to a tone, a DAW or a DIT, your human brain can actually do error correction on the actual DAWs and DITs that you hear. So you actually find that Morse code actually is slowly coming back into the military because it's one of the few modes of communication that actually still works properly. There's also something called SSTV, which is basically slow scan TV where you can take still images and can you take videos? No, that's a fast scan TV. And you can use fast scan TV to send videos over the radio waves and it will be decoded by someone else. So the ISS often brings, has a SSTV, what's it called? Last year the International Space Station was actually transmitting slow scan TV transmissions and anybody with a receiver could actually hook it up to tune it to the right frequency and actually receive those signals and actually decode the actual images that would be transmitted. So amateur radio is fundamentally a hobby. It's a technical hobby but you don't have to have loads of technical knowledge to actually get started. It's enjoyed by all ages. So in October scouts do a thing called Jota, which is jamboree on the air. So basically scout troops get an amateur radio station into their like hot or into their troop and they will for a weekend they will play on the radio. Amateur radio licences will show people how it works, how to operate, what Morse code is and at the end of the weekend they'll get their communications badge. I know people as young as Biva Age, which is about seven or eight, something like that, who love amateur radio and they just need a little push into going into a course, which is really easy. So amateur radio is open for men, women, whoever and all ethnicities. The other good thing about amateur radio operators is that you're allowed to communicate with the International Space Station. So while Tim Peake was in the International Space Station, amateur radio operators were allowed to communicate with him and we were the only people who were allowed to communicate with him outside of NASA. So in schools, in some schools earlier this year, some amateur radio operators went into the schools and allowed the pupils to talk to Tim Peake using amateur radio and from what I've heard, they all loved it and I think even a few people did the amateur radio licence while the Tim Peake talks were going on as well. If you are interested in the International Space Station, we've actually got three passes, we carefully arranged this, so that we've actually got three passes over the site today. One of them will be at just past eight o'clock this evening. So if you are interested in communications with the space station, if you make your way over to the amateur radio village at around about eight o'clock-ish, then they'll be attempting to actually work the space station. They've actually switched off their voice transponder but they will be accepting data transmissions. So it's a good opportunity to actually see a ground station, a satellite ground station in action later on this evening. So amateur radio is a hobby for everyone. You can build electronic circuits, you can build antennas, you can study space weather and propagation, you can use network computers, you can transmit using videos and live TV shows, and you can walk up hills and mountains and operate from there using a thing called SOTA, which is Summits on the Air. The interesting thing about amateur radio is that it is a very, very wide hobby. It doesn't matter what you're interested in, amateur radio has got something for almost everybody used into a technical subject. If it's making things, making antennas, if it's building electronic circuits, we've currently got a guy experimenting at the moment using Arduino and little transmitter, one centimeter square transmitters, actually building handheld transceivers like these for about 20 quid using Arduinos and little 20 centimeter transmitter boards. So what's all this got to do with the floods that we started talking about at the beginning of the actual talk? Unfortunately, when the bridges did go down and the cables were broken and the internet stopped working and the radio communications failed for the emergency services, it was actually amateur radio operators that were called in to actually set up the wireless communications systems on a temporary basis while BT got themselves sorted out. That involved teams like me actually going up to the Lake District with all our wireless radio equipment, erecting stations at key places like police stations, ambulance stations, hospitals, fire stations, council places and things like that, and actually providing the radio communications infrastructure for all these professional services that couldn't actually handle the fact that a cable was broken. So I actually belong to an organization called Rainet, which is the amateur radio emergency network, and we're a team of volunteers that actually go in and provide this infrastructure. This is the last time I'm using free software. Give me PowerPoint any day. At least I know how to rack that. Right, these were some quotes from the actual, this was preparation for this particular event, and this was what was published by Rainet as to what our duties were going to be. If the bridge collapses before the cable work is complete, Rainet will be called out to pass messages between two police stations and four council locations. That was our actual brief for this particular bridge. Cell phones should still work but may be congested. This was a problem that they found at the Twin Towers in America. When the Twin Towers came down in America, the mobile phone lines became very quickly congested because it's amazing how many people want to make a phone call when something drastic happens. And as it with Cumbria in 2009 in America, it was the American version of Rainet that actually provided all the emergency communications because guess what was sitting on top of the Twin Towers when they came down? The two masks that they needed for all the communications for New York were on top of those Twin Towers. So by taking the Twin Towers out, not only did they actually cause the disaster they did, but they also took out the whole communications infrastructure for New York and it was actually amateur radio that stepped in and provided that backup service. The public have been told that if they require emergency services they can go to one of our designated four locations which were amateur radio stations and a radio operator will summon them. Rainet will be manning continuously for possibly nine to 14 days. It actually turned out we had guys up there for 21 days while British telecom sorted themselves out. So amateur radio stepped into the breach with the technology that was needed for that particular time. So while a lot of people think the internet is the bee's knees in communication, wireless communication is, at the end of the day, the one thing that doesn't fail. It's generally always working. If you're actually interested in making things, if you're interested in social networking, if you're interested in even an exciting career, there's lots of engineers here, there's lots of techy people who are already involved in the industry, but amateur radio does serve as a good jumping off point for young people that want to get into an engineering career. We're available on a stand just outside here, GBATMF, where we're running a radio station and there's also guys down in the amateur radio village which you can come and have a chat with if you're interested in any of these subjects. If you're interested in getting into amateur radio itself, it's very, very easy. The entry level to amateur radio is a two-day course with a 27-question test at the end of it and at the end of the test you know whether you've passed or failed. It's a very, very easy hobby to get into. Once you get into it, it's hugely addictive. That's the problem. I actually saw a radio, there was an advert in American magazine and it was a brand new HF receiver and the actual advert was called The Divorce Maker because once you get into amateur radio, it is really, really capturing and you really get involved with it. So that's amateur radio. Hopefully that's been of interest to you and as I say, if you want to come and speak to anybody about amateur radio and wireless communications, please come and see us on the stand outside GBATMF or at the amateur radio village. Thank you.