 Hey, this is Open Research Institute. This is our exhibit at RF Village. We're so happy to be here again. It's a wonderful place. What we do is open source digital radio. We're a nonprofit, so we solve problems for space and terrestrial open source work, and then we give all that work away for free. We do technical work. So here behind us is one of our posters from the poster session, and this is about authentication and authorization for open source satellites. Wait, so hold on. Did you just say open source satellites? Like anyone, like, can I, I feel like this is a dumb question, but can I put up a satellite? Is that a thing? You can, you can put up a satellite. Legally. Yes, legally you can put up a satellite. How? Well, we've been putting up satellites for decades, and there is actually an amateur satellite service. So just like amateur radio, there's amateur satellite service as well. And so that's what most of our work is aimed at, because amateur satellite and amateur radio is such a great way to experiment with open source digital radio. And so that's one of the things we do. We do technical work to make it easier to understand, and we also have done a lot of regulatory work to make it safe for people to volunteer to work on open source communication satellites. Because those are controlled by the government under two sets of regulations, ITAR and EAR. And so one of the things that we did is to set up a framework to make it easy to volunteer for that. Okay, pause it. You said ITAR and ETR. What are the... ITAR and EAR. They're two different sets of regulations. ITAR is from the U.S. State Department, and EAR is from the Commerce Department. So essentially what we did is we said, you know, we need this framework to be useful for open source volunteers. We went out and did it. So we have a poster about that too. Okay. I wanna get back to the whole idea of like I can throw a satellite up in the air. How does that even work? Like what are the steps I would have to take to get my own satellite up? Well, yeah, usually you work with an organization or a group or a company. And what you have to do is solve a whole bunch of problems. So one of the reasons that we exist is because there's such a huge variety of different problems and we think that they should be solved in an open source way. So you have mechanical, you have electrical, communications, thermal, propulsion, attitude control, and a lot of regulatory work. So it's a huge interdisciplinary problem. And that's open source. Like just freely available. So how do you get, like how do you fund it? Is it fun to have donations? Is it fun to have sponsorships? In general, amateur radio, amateur satellites have been funded through donations or in-kind contributions for many decades. There's an amateur satellite that happened right almost after Sputnik. So this is something that's been going on for decades. And it's been done by a really dedicated, wonderful group of people over time. So the answer is yes, you can do it. And it's usually funded by donations or either donations from individuals or from companies. Because the question I have is like, so I want to get involved. This is fascinating that you can just have open source all of this. Because at a certain point, it feels like these are secret things. They were. For the longest, it was very difficult to volunteer and to do this in the open. So that was one of the first things that we had to tackle was to help make it safe. From a regulatory point of view, to do it. The vast majority of satellite work is done under closed or proprietary conditions. And there are some stiff penalties if you break these regulations. That can be very expensive for you and very scary. And we don't want volunteering or open source to be scary. So one of the questions I had is like, I want to get involved. I learn it all. Is there practical applications I can do as an individual? Or do I need to work with a company or a bigger group to be able to do anything with it? Yeah, your best bet is to join a team. There's lots of teams at universities. There's teams like us that are non-profits. There's amateur radio organizations all over the world that do wonderful work in the amateur satellite service. So there's lots of opportunities to do this. And there's a few commercial companies that you could probably either end up working there. Or the few that do open source work would actually take you on. And those are the paths. That's cool. Now, the village is huge. There seem to be tons of talks going on. There's a CTF. Can you tell me a little bit about the CTF going on? Like, what type of aspects are in it? Yeah, this is a wonderful aspect of this village. And so it's generally Wi-Fi based, but not exclusively. And your challenges, if you sit down with either an SDR or usually a software divine radio of some sort, and you take on the challenges. And there's a huge variety. So when you take on the challenges, you have a software defined radio. Are you, you're scanning for the challenges, scanning for the frequencies. You're trying to connect and communicate and maybe dump the information. Just like any good question, the answer is it depends. Because there's a huge variety of ways to do a wireless CTF like this. So you might have to find something in the payload. You might have to demodulator decode something that's not quite standard. You might have to find something that's really obscure. So there's just an immense variety. As you go around and talk to the folks up at the front, they're gonna be able to tell you all sorts of the neat things that are going on this year. Excellent. Hey, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. I'm guessing openresearch.institute is how people get involved. Yeah, we have a getting started link at openresearch.institute. Everyone is welcome. You do not have to be an expert to join. You just have to be willing to become more of one along the way. We're here to help people learn about open source digital radio for space and terrestrial. And we also have some demos over here of things that are working and some stickers and some patches and some buttons and all sorts of fun things. Excellent. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for watching and hack on.