 So welcome to my talk. I'm Bruce Sutherland and my talk is how to get your message out when your government turns off the internet. This was inspired by the events in the Middle East earlier this year and seemed to be continuing where basically in Egypt the government decided they're not going to completely turn off the internet but they're going to block the DNS servers which for all intents and purposes disabled it for the people that wanted to use it. So a little bit about myself. I've been in information systems field for 20 plus years and designed and implemented network since ARCNET was standard and I wanted to see a show of hands because I can't really see anything up here. Anyway it was a long time ago early 80s and I've been writing code professionally for 15 plus years everything from visual basic to C to Python, Perl, PHP, you name it. Been a licensed ham operator for 8 plus years and really enjoy that. And I prefer UNIX type operating systems over Microsoft anything for obvious reasons. So a little bit about ham radio. It's old tech basically and typically to get the distance out of ham radio you need two pretty skilled operators on either end with good setups. High power, good receivers, good transmitters, good antennas and the people on either end usually need to know what they're doing or else bad things can happen. So this is an example of a station you would need to transmit long distances or communicate with over long distances. You need a pretty sensitive transceiver that this one pictured here costs about $6,000. And it's got all kinds of digital signal processing capabilities to eliminate noise and static and things like that. Typically you need good atmospheric conditions to get distance out of this kind of system but with enough power and the right antennas you can also do it. It also works. But again you kind of need to know what you're doing. The amplifier pictured here which costs about $4,000 will give you a maximum output of 1,500 watts which is kind of what you need to talk from say somewhere like pretty much halfway around the world like the Middle East to say the middle of the United States. I've heard plenty of conversations and the guys usually say what they're using and this is what they're using. This amplifier requires a 220 volt outlet and a high-ampage breaker in your panel to be able to get that limit. Also another thing that's very important is the antenna in any radio system. This one pictured is a little complicated. That's not really what's required but something of that magnitude is what you're going to need. And that could cost upwards of $10,000. So like I said before you kind of need to know what you're doing with this because you could, if you don't know what you're doing and do something wrong you could disrupt communications of other services, commercial services, things like that and or electrocute yourself, cook your eyeballs which is actually in the ham radio license manual and or annoy your neighbors at the very least. So the equipment we're going to use to do this operation consists of a small handheld radio with an output of about 5 watts of power. It doesn't sound like a lot but that's really all we need to do what we're going to do. And a small handheld antenna. Here's a picture of me demonstrating the proper use of the equipment. So a little bit about obtaining a ham radio license. It's really easy for the technicians license which is the first one that you have to get. Basically anybody with half a brain can do it. I think most kids in school should be taught to do it. I mean they're learning the same things anyway and they may as well go ahead and take this. It's like I said it's very easy to do. For the things we're going to do in this talk, a technicians license is all you need. It allows you to legally transmit on the frequencies we're going to need to use. And the test is basically a 35 question test out of a pool of 400 questions. But the questions and the answers to the questions are freely available. And they're usually in the back of the study guides that you buy. If you go on to Amazon or somewhere like that and just type in ham radio license exam or study guide you'll see the appropriate books. And that's the recommended method. To actually learn the material, study from it, things like that. You can memorize the test by going to websites where you can basically, they'll ask you questions over and over and over until you get them right. So you're basically memorizing the test. And they'll present all 400 in that pool to you. So once you get ready to take that you can go to the www.AWRL.org website and that'll give you times and locations for the test. And I recommend that before you go to take this test contact the location first because sometimes it'll be listed but they won't be doing it at that time for some reason. So that's a good idea. Now once you take your test and pass it the paperwork has to be submitted to the FCC because they have to assign you a call sign. And once that is submitted it takes about two weeks from what I remember. And then what they're going to do is they're going to post it up on their website, up on their database there. And once it's in there you can start transmitting. You're good to go. You will get a paper certificate or a license that you need to post in your station and stuff like that but you don't have to wait for that to come in to start using it. So the technology that we're going to use for this is going to be in the VHF band which is 144 megahertz between 144 and 148 megahertz. And we're going to use a system called Automatic Packet Reporting System or APRS. And what it is basically is a digital system that is transported over AX.25 protocol which is amateur radio version of X.25 protocol runs at about 1200 BOD and is good for the short messages we're going to be sending. APRS only has I think three or four different types of packets that can be sent. One of which is a beacon and one of which is a message. The message is what we're concerned about because that's what we're going to be transmitting our message in. The antenna that I showed in the previous slide is not really necessary but it's a good idea to have that. You'll get more range out of it. You'll be able, you'll have more time to send your message if you use that kind of antenna but it's not 100% required. You could use the whip that comes with the radio itself. And let's see what we're going to do here. And then the other thing we're going to use is an amateur radio satellite to do this job. Reason being because basically when satellites are orbiting, depending on what their altitude is, they have a really large footprint. And the one we're going to primarily be using is the International Space Station which is a 2500 mile footprint. So if you're talking about somewhere in the Middle East, there's plenty of countries in range from the hotspot to somewhere that's not in a hotspot. So a little bit about APRS is developed in the late 80s by Bob Brininga. He works at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He's first developed on an Apple II computer and later on an IBM PC when it came out. And it's designed, this protocol is designed to share your GPS position and ID which is your call sign, among a large number of local stations. And what that's good for is if you're running an event like say a race, like a marathon or something like that, you would have stations like water stations, medical stations, various organizers, all being stations on this network. And with the appropriate equipment you could put all these or plot all these on a map and as they move around you would see them move around on the map. So it's good for tracking assets and things like that for an event. So the other thing that's necessary is what's called a digipeter which is basically a repeater station that reads in all the or listens for all the traffic and then repeats it back out. These are usually located up on a tower somewhere or on a mountain. In our case it's going to be a satellite. And that's good for larger events like for instance like a car race where everything is all spread out and you have a lot more stations and things like a lot more assets to track to see where everything is. Another thing we're going to use is called an eye gate. And what that is is it's a link between the radio part of this network and the internet. APRS doesn't use TCPIP like I said it uses AX.25 and the eye gate does the translation between the two basically. And there happens to be one on the International Space Station which is good for us. So other necessary infrastructure, Twitter, if you remember back in Egypt everybody was trying to send messages out to Twitter and Facebook. And that seemed to be the main outlet for information coming out of that region to the point where the US government asked Twitter to not do service, not perform service on their systems so that this information could keep flowing. So basically what we're going to do is we're going to be sending a message from a ham radio to Twitter directly. And of course that requires an eye gate like I just explained in another country, obviously a country where you're not being affected or not, your internet's not being shut down. And I'll show you some graphics about over the Middle East where within that 2,500 mile radius or distance, there are a lot of countries. If you look at Tripoli in Libya or any of the cities in Egypt right across the Mediterranean are a lot of other countries that, you know, are democratic countries basically and typically this is not going to happen. And there are a lot of eye gates over there as well. And so when I was preparing this talk I went looking for APRs to Twitter gateways and I found two but neither of them worked. They had websites and everything explaining what to do but they just, I couldn't get them to work at all so basically I wrote my own. And you can read about that at hamradiotweets.com. Also the Twitter account is hamradiotweets at hamradiotweets. So here's a graphic showing that the system, a basic layout of the system where you have the handheld radio transmitting your message up to the satellite. The satellite then turns around and repeats it back to earth in that 2,500 mile area and is usually picked up by an eye gate or digipeter combination and once the eye gate gets it, it goes on the internet where my gateway listens out for that message and sends it to Twitter, to that account on Twitter. There was one other service out there that you had to enter your Twitter information and you could post to your own account but again that didn't work and I'm not sure why and there was no explanation. I just couldn't get it to work at all. So the setup to send to Twitter on your radio, on your handheld radio, you set the frequency to 145.825 megahertz. That is the specific frequency that the space station uses for their APRS digipeter. In the radio there is a field called digipath and it's basically like routing information for this protocol. You can have multiple stations in that digipath but to use the space station you have to use ARIS as the first one and so you should enter that in there. To compose your message basically you send the message to TWITR which is the name that my gateway is looking out for on the internet. If you wanted to send a message to a specific other station you would enter their call sign in that field and then of course your message. The next thing you do is basically you have to wait and I'll go into more detail about this in a minute but you have to wait until you and an IGATE are in the satellite's footprint. Once you send your message and the IGATE picks it up you're good to go. One bad thing is you don't really get any acknowledgement that your message went through or got through but I'll tell you a technique in a second of how to do that. So a good way to do that is when the satellite is coming over, when the satellite comes up over the horizon basically send out what's called a beacon and that's a certain type of packet that I mentioned before that's part of APRS and that basically just broadcasts your call sign and your position information, your GPS position information. Now that could be good or bad because obviously if that's being monitored by the government that's shutting down the internet you don't want them to find you. You don't have to use GPS coordinates for that you can put your own coordinates in and you can have that be on the other side of the globe if you want and they'll just never know. There are other ways to be detected but that's one way to avoid that and so basically you send out beacons until you hear the satellite reply or send that, send your same beacon back to you. That's when you know everything's set up, the satellite's in the right position, it can hear you, you're ready to go and once you hear that your beacon come back you send your message out and that's a good way, I find that works pretty much 100% of the time to get your message sent. So as far as the ham radio satellites you can use like I mentioned the International Space Station is the best one because it's a stable platform in that it's manned usually all the time. They have a lot of power, endless supply of power up there and if anything goes wrong and something needs to be rebooted, they can do that. There's somebody up there to do that. So there are other ones that I'll mention, they're a little bit unusable. This juncture but PCSAT is an older satellite that was created by the Navy, the Navy School in Annapolis and that's kind of on its last legs, the batteries are shot, it only works in daylight, it doesn't have a lot of power to transmit with and so you have to have things really set up correctly, have your antenna pointed directly at that thing to get it to work. I've tried it maybe 30 times and only got it to work twice so it's really not usable but I figured I'd mention it because basically that's one of the only other satellites up there that does this job. There was another one launched by the Chinese called Hope One but they can't seem to get it working and that's unfortunate because it's got a lot of different radio equipment on it that does different things that are kind of neat including this function of being a digipeter and like I said they can't seem to get it working so basically you can track it and you can listen for it, all it does is it transmits its call sign in Morse code so if you hear that you found it but that's about all you can do with it. There was another one called Aresat that was supposed to be launched early this year but for some reason it got, kept getting put on the back burner and it was supposed to be launched in March, got struck off the schedule. Basically what they have to do is go on a spacewalk, hold it outside and then release it into space. That was set to go in July I think, July or early August like August, no I think it was July, late July and I was watching this live, the spacewalk live when this was going on and they were all ready to release it, the Russian cosmonaut was standing outside the space station holding on to the space station with one hand and with the satellite in his other hand, waiting for the word to go to release it and I noticed something on the screen, there's two antennas sticking out of this thing because it uses two different bands, the VHF and the UHF band, there was no UHF antenna on it which is bad, bad. You release something like that and it basically becomes space junk, you can't use it. So anyway, they realized that the last minute thankfully, pulled it back in and it got released I think two days ago so it's orbiting now and it's supposedly working, I haven't tried to contact it since I've been here but you can also go to AMSAT, AMSAT.org, they have a really nice matrix of all the satellites that do different functions, radio functions, amateur radio functions and they tell you which ones are up or down or intermittent so you can get a good idea of what's up there and what to use or what to try to use and they usually have, the individual satellites usually have their own website that explains what frequency they're on, how to use them, how to set your digipath, things like that. So satellite pass prediction, this is kind of important because to be effective you kind of need to have, the satellite has to be in the right place, you need to be ready for it and things like that. A really good site for this is N2YO.com, it's basically they provide prediction tables and also a real time representation of where the given satellite that you're looking for is and they plot it on a Google map and then they show you the tracks for I think two orbits so that's really helpful. They also give you like I said prediction tables that you can actually have it notify you via SMS or email when this thing's about to come over the horizon now. That's of course not going to help you when the government turns off your internet but to practice and to get used to this, that's a great tool to use. I use it all the time. Another one is called Satscape, it's a Java based locally installed piece of software and in my opinion it talks a good game but it doesn't work real well. I missed many, many satellite passes using that piece of software so I don't really recommend it but it's good to try something else out and see how it works. Another thing you can do is go to the AMSAT website and there are prediction, past prediction tools on there that you can basically choose your satellite, choose the dates and it'll give you a printout of 50, the next 50 passes which would be good to take with you into this region that you're going, that you want to send this message from. So also N2YO will give you up to five days of passes so basically right before you leave, print this out and you should be good. Here's an example of a prediction table from N2YO. If you look in the columns you'll see at the very top start, max altitude and end. The start, well it starts with the date and time and that's obviously I mean you need to know when the date and time is but the start they give you an azimuth which is basically a heading, a compass heading and that's the compass heading that it's going to come over the horizon on. If you look under the max altitude section under elevation that's the elevation that it's going to be at its highest point so basically the first listing there is a three degree elevation that's not a good pass. It's very rare you're going to be able to use that unless you're on top of a really tall building or a mountain or near the ocean if it's coming over the horizon there. A better pass would be that second row which is a 55 degree pass. And so basically you kind of need to have an accurate watch or a clock and a compass if you want to be really dead on with this thing. If not you can kind of estimate and do it by ear because you'll be able to hear those packets coming in over the radio. Once you hear it and the more you do this the more you get used to it. So you'll know what a good sounding packet sounds like. So once you start hearing that and it starts coming in pretty clearly which is not hard with the space station because of the power I mentioned earlier. You just start transmitting your beacon and then once you hear yours transmit your message and you should be good. So here's another graphic from N2YO. This is, let me go back to the other graphic real quick. If you look at the check boxes there under, see where it says map. There's a bunch of check boxes. Basically this graphic is if you check all those boxes and map them this is what you get. And you'll see that circle, the footprint of the satellite. I have it centered over Las Vegas right now so you can kind of see what kind of range you'll get. The flat part up at the top of the circle is because of the curvature of the earth in case you're wondering. But you'll see the range. I mean you can get up into Canada with this. In fact I'm from Florida, Central Florida and I routinely get packets coming in from Canada, Mexico, Cuba even from Florida. So some use cases. We'll start with Libya, go to Egypt and then the USA, Syria and the USA. USA was kind of a, that's an example of a USA use case. So the problem with that is in Mexico there are not a lot of eye gates. I think there's two that I found. And you'll see a graphic later on with another website where you can actually track and locate stations using APRS. And that's actually pretty neat to see. Especially as in Greece, there's a lot of islands around Greece and so a lot of ferries going around. All those ferries and watercraft of a certain size are required to use APRS for tracking. So it's kind of neat to see that. But anyway, to go on with the United States use case, Mexico like I found two eye gates there. Your best bet is probably like Vancouver area up in British Columbia there. And that's assuming that the entire United States is off the internet, which I don't know what will have to happen for that to take place, but you never know. So here's Libya. The center there is over Tripoli and you can see how many countries, if you look up north, you can see how many countries are covered either partially or entirely by this footprint. And countries like Spain, France, Turkey, Greece, they all have tons and tons of eye gates. So you have plenty of opportunity to use this kind of system from this area. Libya typically doesn't have a lot of population. Most of it's on the coast, I think two or three major cities. The rest of it's desert. So there's really nothing there. And really there's nothing down into Africa either. So your best case is the northern Western European countries. So just off the coast of Libya is the island of Malta. And there's actually an eye gate on Malta, one eye gate. But north of that is Italy. And there are a ton of eye gates there. Another thing you'll see too, you'll notice, if you look on the piece of Italy that's protruding from the top there, you'll see a couple of blue circles with WX and those are weather stations. A lot of weather stations are also on the APRS network, which is another neat feature. You could, using this website where this graphic is coming from, it's on the bottom there, aprs.fi. This is the website that you use to track all the stations worldwide. Anywhere there APRS and APRS stations that get routed onto the internet, you'll see it on this website in real time. So as far as the weather stations go, you can click on those blue circles and get real time weather anywhere in the world. Another neat thing is too, when the earthquakes were happening in Japan, the Japanese have a lot of earthquake sensors off the coast for obvious reasons. Those are all APRS enabled. So you can monitor those to see, you know, what kind of seismic activity is happening around Japan. And of course, the Japanese are, you know, are very tech savvy. And so you're going to have to zoom way into Japan. Otherwise, the number of APRS stations, it just blocks out the entire country. It's crazy. So here's a use case for Egypt. And again, right across, you'll see up north, Italy and Turkey or Greece and Turkey are widely covered. And so there's plenty of opportunity to use it from there as well. That black square is the island of Cyprus, which I'll show you in a minute, which I think there are a couple of eye gates on that on that island. So here's that graphic. There are also, there are other, you'll see other icons on there. It looks like little green stars. Those are other APRS stations that do different things. And using this website, you can basically hover the mouse over any of them and it'll tell you what they are, whether they're mobile or static or what their deal is. And if you click on them, you'll get their information just in the same format that you're seeing now. So again, this is, this is an Egyptian use case. This is Greece you're looking at. And Greece has a lot of different APRS stations, both sea based and land based that do all kinds of different things. So the system's not foolproof. There are a lot of things that can go wrong with it in that there's a lot of components in between that need to be operating for the system to work. A lot of the old school Ham guys kind of complain about these new fangled technologies because in their mind, you know, all you need is your station and then somebody else's station you can communicate. If you have the right equipment, of course. And they're partially right in that I was able to use, one of my first radios was a 100 watt maximum system. And using a homemade wire antenna, I was able to talk to someone in the Falkland Islands from Florida. But of course, atmospheric conditions come into that a lot. They have to be perfect. And, you know, to be able to get that kind of range. So it's not really reliable. But with this VHS system, if everything's in place, it'll work. Now, this slide basically says you can be detected what you're looking at is a is an American profit signal intelligence platform built into a mine hardened vehicle. Not all governments have this, but you know, the US supplies a lot of military hardware to other governments. So you never know what you're coming up against. So that's one thing. Like I mentioned before, you transmit your position, but you don't have to use your actual GPS coordinates, you can put whatever put in whatever you want. And the best thing to do is if you think you're going to be detected, after you transmit, move, just just be mobile. And with this radio, I mean, you see how small it is, it basically takes up the palm of your hand. And it's easy to transport. And that antenna I showed you as well that that beam antenna that Yagi antenna, that also breaks down into a roll up bag, basically, so it's very, very portable. So the next thing is you can be jammed. What you're looking at is a is an A10 aircraft with an electronic countermeasures pod. Basically, what that thing is designed for is, if the Air Force wanted to go into an area and do operations there and shut down the entire cellular network, which runs in the 902 2.9 megahertz to 2.4 gigahertz range, I'm pretty sure, depending on what system you're using. They can send this aircraft up, circle around the area with that ECM pod turned on, and you won't be able to use your cell phone for as long as they don't want you to. And it's not only cell phones, it can be any kind of radio any kind of wireless, like if they don't want you to use it, you won't use it because of this device. And again, the US isn't the only country that has this. This is just the most convenient picture I could find. Internet links go down. Hopefully in the countries with the eye gates, there are so many of them that one internet link going down is not going to affect you. And in places like Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and so on, there are many, many, many eye gates. So this typically won't affect you, but it is a possibility. So you can miss the satellite. Your your past prediction tables could be wrong. You could print out your past prediction tables and they could move the satellite, they could re, you know, re orbit the space station if they needed to. And your past prediction would be off. Typically, the other satellites like Aerosat, Hope, the Hope one sat if it was working. Those can't really be reorbited. They don't I don't think they have thrusters on them. And so those will be pretty standard, pretty steady orbits. Oh, one thing I forgot to mention about the ECM pod. One good thing about that system, about using a satellite to do this job is the satellite orbits pretty much every 90 minutes. So unless they want to send a plane up every 90 minutes to jam you. I mean, there are other ways to do that. They can hoist that ECM pod from a balloon, keep it up there for a long time. But it's not forever. That satellite is going to be orbiting forever, basically. Another thing to consider is the on the satellites, it's possible to have those digipeters turned off, they can be turned off from the ground. And in fact, the space station, usually when they're not using that equipment, they they leave it in digipeter mode. But sometimes they make appointments with schools for educational reasons. And they use the same antenna that that the digipeter uses. So they turn it off at that point. Hopefully it'll be a Twitter type situation where if they know people are trying to use it to get information out, they won't turn it off. And then of course, Twitter invented the fail whale. Twitter can go down in case you didn't know that. The gateway that I wrote is pretty much I wrote it six days ago, in about two hours. So it's pretty quick and dirty implementation. I intend to improve it some. But using the Twitter API, that could also go down as well. And the gateway will just never get the message through to Twitter. And that's pretty much it. Here's some resources that I recommend. APRS for the information on APRS. AMSAT for the satellite information. And to IO for the tracking. Yezu, that's that radio that I use is a Yezu handheld radio. I like those very much. Arrow antennas, that's that handheld Yaggy that breaks down. Those are great. And my email. So if there are any questions. Okay, the question was how vulnerable is this system to interception and about the use of encryption? Well, first of all, not that this would come into effect. But per FCC guidelines, you're not supposed to encrypt any amateur radio traffic. The only thing that's allowed to be encrypted is when you're sending commands to an amateur radio satellite. Those can be encrypted legally. So your message can be detected and the message can be seen. But after it gets out, it's out. So I mean, I guess you could encode it somehow. But typically these radios don't have that feature. There are other setups that you can use that are not so portable where you have a receiver transmitter radio and then a computer attached to it that either uses the sound card as a modem. You could theoretically encrypt that. Although you won't find that option in any software because it's really not allowed. So you'd have to kind of write your own. I saw another question over here somewhere. I'm sorry, I didn't. Well, that's what I was saying before. There's really no acknowledgement that comes back to your radio from Twitter. Well, there is some, I could build that into the gateway where the gateway acknowledges, you know, messages that were actually posted on Twitter. There is a way to do that. I can have the gateway send a message back. But typically when you're using a satellite, you only have a 20 minute maximum window from when it comes over the horizon to when it drops back below the horizon. And that's on a, that's on a really good pass, like a 90 degree pass where it's right over, directly over, which is not very often. So anyone else? I'm sure that's classified. No, you'd have to be within its range. Oh, no, that won't affect you. Yeah. And because you're transmitting into space, there's a lot of space in there and a lot of range in there, you know. And I'm not sure what the range of these ECM pods are, but I'm sure they can crank them up or down as they need. Theoretically, if the country is small enough, sure. You mean to be able to jam? That's true. That's, yeah, that could happen as well. But, you know, I guess this would have to be a big threat like a lot of people would have to be using this for the government to try and, you know, put up a stationary jamming station in their own country. I'm sure the citizens wouldn't like that either. So anyone else? Sure. I'm not sure the first term you use, but Pico Satellites meeting really small. Yeah. In fact, that aeroset I mentioned is not big. It's about the size of a bread box. It's not big at all. There's not a whole lot of equipment in it. It's mostly batteries. And then every surface is solar panels. So yeah, that's, it's very, I mean, I've seen satellites as small as, you know, like this that do one or two functions and doesn't cost a lot to launch that. I mean, for the size it does. But, you know, what's the international space station? So I'm sure the US government couldn't dictate what to do and what not to do. I mean, it's funny because when they're American astronauts on board, they change the call sign to ARIS, A-R-I-S-S. And when there's Russians, it's R-S-I-S-S. So that's a good question. I don't know. I don't know who controls that. I know the space command, either space command, you know, Russian or American or whoever. And there are other countries that send astronauts up there. I'm sure if they all got together and made a decision, they could shut it off. So, uh-huh. Political discourse meaning to organize like an uprising, for instance? Is that what you're asking? The question was, are there any ramifications for using amateur radio to, to promote political discourse? Correct? There's something like that in the rules. Basically the only rule is they say you can't conduct business over amateur radio. Um, and I'm sure, what's that? Broadcasting of, of what? Because radio by default is broadcasting. Oh, no, that's correct. Um, you can't play stuff like music and, and things like that in news. Typically no, you can't, it's not supposed to be used as a radio station. It's supposed to be used as a communications tool. Um, and, and this use of the satellite is a communications tool really. So, what about, um, well, the amount of, the question is how much information, what's the maximum information that can be passed over this kind of link? Um, it's not a lot. It's not a lot to use degenography. Like images, that would be hard. Well, I mean, there is part of, there is a, a mode in amateur radio called slow scan TV, which is used for sending pictures. And some of these newer microsatellites that go up have that capability. Um, so theoretically you could, you could do that. But, um, it's not, it's not really designed for that kind of use. So, slow scan TV typically is used on, um, if you're, if you're transmitting terrestrial, where you have two stations and a computer, you know, on both ends obviously, one to send, one to receive. You could do something like that, sure. And I don't know that anybody would know that you're doing that. So, theoretically you could do that. APRS typically runs at 1200 BOD. Um, I've seen it at 9600, but that's kind of pushing it. So it's, it's really used for short text messages. So that's, that's the best. Um, the question was, does it use any kind of compression algorithm? No typically. And maybe it could be construed as, as encryption. Um, if you, if you compress it with a secret key of some kind, then yeah. But typically that's not done because the messages are so short and they need to be in, in clear text. So, meaning can you have a digipeter on a drone? Theoretically, yeah. Um, I don't know who would do that because since government's kind of the only people that have drones. But yeah, you could do something like that. Or I've seen also digipeters on balloons. High altitude balloons. So sure, you could use that. Now, the problem with that is tracking. It's hard to track a balloon. Unless it's transmitting its own beacon with its own GPS position, then you kind of know where it is. But it's, it's harder to track something like that than a satellite. Sure, you could do that. The question was what about the use of, use of satellite internet providers? And the answer is yes, you could do that. But you could also be jammed as well with that same ECM situation. Um, you know, for a limited time obviously, because those, those satellites are actually stationary. They sit above the equator typically and cover, you know, half the globe. They're, they're also higher altitude. So their footprint is a lot bigger. Anyone else? All right. Thanks very much.