Ham Radio Village - The RF Dark Arts
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Total S.A.Software-defined radioBitGoodness of fitQuicksortString (computer science)Right angleComputer animation
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Hacker (term)Digital photographyTelecommunicationComputer animation
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Different (Kate Ryan album)Computer animationMeeting/Interview
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Function (mathematics)Figurate numberQuicksortFamilySoftware testingPower (physics)Goodness of fitFreewareRange (statistics)Meeting/InterviewComputer animation
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YouTubeCrash (computing)Software testingTelecommunicationRight angleDigital electronicsComputer animation
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Lattice (order)BitLattice (order)Local ringEvent horizonSoftware testingNetiquette
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Traffic reportingExplosionFamilyUniform resource locatorDigitizingPhysical systemComputer programmingComputer animationMeeting/Interview
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NetiquetteEvent horizonService (economics)Water vaporVideo gameDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Multiplication signSoftware bugWeight1 (number)System callSign (mathematics)Computer animation
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NeuroinformatikPhysical systemAsynchronous Transfer ModePower (physics)WeightSoftware development kitDistanceQuicksortDemo (music)HookingLevel (video gaming)Range (statistics)Computer animationMeeting/Interview
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Modal logicStreaming mediaGreatest elementSource codeBroadcasting (networking)Asynchronous Transfer ModeInternetradioWebsiteQuicksortInternetworkingDigitizingWeb 2.0Software-defined radioComputer animation
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Systems engineeringWeb 2.0CAN busSoftware-defined radioMultiplication signQuicksortComputer animation
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Medical imaging
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Demo (music)Software-defined radioMereologySoftwareComputer animation
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
So good morning everyone. Our next speaker today in Ham Village is Jason W2LDU here to talk to you about the RF Dark Arts. Let's give him a big warm Ham Radio Village welcome, thank you. Thank you. All right, I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview of how I came into
00:25
Ham Radio in the past year or so and then give you a little demonstration of SDR and sort of how to find things on SDR and we'll go from there. So what's my background? I identify as a
00:41
hacker, I joined a local hackerspace about seven years ago, started messing around with Arduino, wiring stuff, I'm an amateur photographer, so I have a decent background in electronics-y stuff, but radio just always seemed like magic to me.
01:05
There's a lot of different things in radio that just don't make sense, throwing together a bunch of coils of wiring capacitors coming from Arduino doesn't seem like it would do much. So a few years ago I started
01:25
going on some road trips with friends and we wanted to communicate easier within the car, sort of figure out rest stops and entertain ourselves, that sort of thing. And I got a GMRS license and this is a test-free radio license, you apply online,
01:45
you get $70 and you keep it for 10 years and you get a lot more use out of it than say the Motorola family radios, you can go much higher power, you can use repeaters to have a much higher range, and this was sort of my stepping stone, an easy way to
02:06
play around with radio and be able to transmit without having to take a test. But GMRS still isn't very good, it's sort of a niche radio service that's mainly used for families, the license actually covers your direct family, so everyone in your household, cousins and
02:27
step whatevers, but a lot of people use it for hunting or off-road and there are large areas of the country that just don't have repeaters where you would have to stay within you know maybe 10 miles of each other to be able to talk.
02:44
So I said I think I should just get an amateur radio license, I, there's a lot of places online where you can take practice tests and just get an idea of what they're going to ask you, and I ran through one with zero preparation and because of my
03:01
background in Arduino I got like 50% of it, I was really surprised that the a good portion of the test is basic electronics and circuit design stuff that's you know was stuff that I already knew and the rest of it was you know like legal requirements and what you can and can't do and basically to keep you out of trouble. There's also a bunch of other resources
03:27
online, this is a YouTube channel, Ham Radio Crash Course, they have a playlist going through every single question in the test explaining what exactly are they asking, why is the right
03:41
answer right, why are the wrong answers wrong, and this along with just continuing practice tests allowed me to get a 34 to 35 on my test after maybe a month or two of prep. So now what? Well obviously I'm going to buy a bunch of radios, the other thing you want to do
04:03
is listen, the test really doesn't prepare you for how to actually talk to each other and the how to not burn yourself on RF and how to not get the feds knocking on your door. There are some other really great local resources, there are Ham Fest which is just a
04:27
large gathering of hams selling stuff, promoting their events, really great for learning what's around you and what kind of other things are going on that you could participate in, club meetings can be good, there are a lot of small local radio repeater clubs,
04:47
there's probably like 10 or 15 in my metro area that I could choose from, those are a little bit more stuffy because they're like full events with minutes and garbage, but there's also much more casual events, so around me there is something called a Ham Feast which is basically
05:07
every Saturday night we would go just pick a random restaurant, go hang out, have dinner and just be friends rather than talking about business and then I started getting into APRS
05:22
and this is actually a digital packet mode where with your radio you can upload a packet with GPS coordinates, altitude, speed, heading, text, what other channel you're monitoring so other people around you can talk to you and this was really great for me because
05:43
I went on a few road trips alone and I could just send my family a URL and they could see where I was and didn't require them to have a license or anything, they could just see where I was that day, where I was going, you can also receive packets from repeaters around you to sort of get an idea lay of the land of what's out there
06:06
and you can also see the other people around you that are beaconing and you know communicate either connect to them on whatever radio they're monitoring on or you know there's a lot of
06:21
really cool stuff that you can do and see when you have a system that shows a lot of stuff that's around you and on the radio. There's also a program called Echolink and you can run this on a mobile phone or on a desktop, this allows you to connect to repeaters all around the world
06:44
this was really cool because you can bounce around the US, bounce around the world, get an idea of what people are talking about, you know connect with people back home wherever that may be, there's also amateur nets and this is where at a scheduled time it can be daily,
07:05
weekly, monthly, a bunch of people get on a single repeater and go around and just say you know talk about what's going on in their life, there's a lot of different kinds as well, around me there's a new ham net, so the people running it are much more accepting it if
07:25
someone say forgets to say their call sign or you know has a stupid what would be a stupid question they're really good for getting your footing on transmitting on the radio and getting some questions answered. There's also a lot of emergency services on amateur radio and there
07:46
are a few near me that can be really interesting to participate in from time to time. One of the recent ones asked if water went out at your house think about how long you would be able to
08:03
stay there and be able to live before you need to bug out to somewhere else, sort of get you thinking about what happens in an emergency and what things, what preparation you might need to shore up in your own life. So once I got comfortable and had a kidney to sell I bought
08:26
an HF radio to try and get out further. This is a map of people that I've heard from my home and this is all on less than 10 watts which is a tiny amount of power for this kind of distance. We actually have a demo set up using this exact system whisper net which is meant for
08:47
long range low power and it's a very interesting way to you know be able to say that you've talked to Ottawa. And I learned my lesson when I got into HF when I first got my license I just
09:03
sort of bought every radio I saw that seemed interesting and I ended up with a bunch of radios that could do mostly the same stuff. But with an HF radio I really did my research figured out what exactly I would need to hook up hook it up to my computer to do digital modes
09:20
and then once I figured out exactly what I wanted I got it and it was only only 700 dollars for the whole kit. But a lot of people might be interested in what you can do without a license. There are lots of websites online that allow you to stream basically anything you could
09:45
think of. Broadcastify is a great website they this is showing on the top left is showing amateur radio repeaters around Las Vegas so there's you know about 10 of them there and most of these are streaming 24 7 you can just hop on click on it listen like an internet
10:04
radio station sort of see what's going on. And then on the bottom we have DMR radio and so this is a digital mode for amateur radio and because it's all digital it all goes through the internet and so they've set up a website so that you can just tap in at the source and
10:27
all these are open to anyone. There's also something called Web SDR and these are really expensive radio rigs which allow you to listen to HF and shortwave radio.
10:42
There's probably about 10 in the US and it can be used by a lot of people at the same time so you you don't have to kick someone else off to see what's going on and this can be a really cool way to sort of dip your feet into HF or if you are interested in shortwave radio
11:01
it has basically every setting that you could think of to be able to to listen to whatever is out there. You can also buy a $30 SDR which is what I'll be showing you today. These have a very wide range of receive so you can get anything from AM or FM radio all the way
11:23
up to in the gigahertz range almost up to wi-fi and then you can also get a cheap radio for mobile listening on Amazon but you have to be careful. These can get you into serious federal trouble if you do something wrong. One of the important things with ham radio is
11:47
knowing where you should and shouldn't transmit and being doubly sure of that because it's a federal thing. So since an SDR can receive a wide range of things what can it do?
12:02
Well like I said you can listen to almost anything. You can track planes. The planes have a little transponder in them that give again GPS coordinates altitude heading radio call sign. This is a very easy setup that can be done for less than a hundred dollars
12:21
and you can see basically any airplane or helicopter that's you know within 150 200 miles of where you're at. These can be pretty interesting because if you've ever looked at the flight aware app or website to see what planes are overhead they filter out some of the more interesting stuff. So with my setup at home I can see police helicopters if they're you know circling
12:46
over something or circling overhead. I've also seen some really interesting military tankers over the Yuma test site with weird call signs like skull one and skull two.
13:00
No idea what that was about but interesting nonetheless. You can also receive images directly from the space station. This is actually what pushed me to get further into radio. My local hackerspace had an event where we made a Yagi antenna with laser cut plywood and copper tape and used a cheap five dollar SDR to pull an image directly
13:25
off the space station. They do events like this maybe every couple of months and they usually do like in a whole weekend where they have like 10 or 12 images that they send down one after the other so you can try and receive them all. And I should say these are all images
13:45
that I received and decoded myself. I'm pretty happy with these. There are also a lot of weather satellites that are up there that aren't encrypted and you can pull data off of them.
14:00
This one in particular is a amazingly high res digital geostationary satellite that gives a full disc view of the earth. There are also some older analog ones that will give you sort of swaths of the earth as they rotate as they go around. These can be a little bit
14:20
trickier especially the geostationary one because it's a little further out but it's a really amazing challenge and one I hope to be able to get into further. There's also a NOAA weather fax and this is for boats and airplanes out across the ocean that need to know what they're coming up on. This is all in HF and it allows you to decode an image of
14:49
swells or high winds or stuff like that. This is also something that seems really cool that I'd like to try out myself. There's also NOAA weather radio. This is basically the entire
15:05
US is covered with this with multiple stations and these are really great for say you're on a road trip and you're you know going to another state you can just flip on one of these see what the weather's like over there. They also give alerts for extreme weather
15:25
so this can be a really great resource for knowing what's going on in that realm. Alright and then I'd like to give a demo. So this is the antenna for the SDR. The actual SDR part is a
15:44
relatively small USB device. This setup is about 10 steps. It's really not that difficult and all the software for it is free. So once we have it set up we can press play
16:01
and we're receiving radio. Right here as you see sort of in the middle it says FM broadcast. This is FM radio. I've found that with this setup this is actually one of the best sounding FM radios that I've used.
16:23
You can also poke around and find air bands. In a moment I'll pull up some websites that will allow you to sort of sort through and figure out stuff local to you but this whole swath of
16:41
radio is pretty much airplanes up in the air, airplanes talking to air traffic control. Can be very interesting to to listen in on. I actually went to the airport to pick someone up a little while ago and it's really fun for me to just sort of drive through the airport and scan through and and hear what's going on up in the air just above me. So we can come up to
17:10
the ham radio band see if we can find anything good going on. Looks pretty quiet today.
17:26
If we were seeing anything it would give a spike on this top blue line and then at the bottom we would see varying colors. There's something varying colors to to show how intense the signal
17:43
is. All right let's keep going up further see what else we can find. There's also a marine band. The the websites also have sort of marine band standard channels and then I think that within this space you can sort of just sort of go wherever you want as for
18:03
point-to-point communication. There's also military air voice. Anything military U.S. government is pretty much going to be encrypted. So talking about legality for a second
18:22
um anything that's encrypted you cannot listen to. Decrypting it is illegal but anything out in the open in FM analog or using a standard digital mode you can listen to that
18:41
as much as you want. Let's see where else. Up here in the 70 centimeter ham band also looking pretty quiet. We are in a very RF noisy environment down here on the strip so it's going to be a lot harder to pick up things here than
19:03
it would be say back at Tuscany where I'm staying or wherever you guys are from hopefully. In the five and six hundred well five to eight hundred megahertz range there's a lot of
19:21
police radio, ambulance, firefighters. I think there's a lot of hotel radio up here. You can poke around a little bit and sort of get an idea of where things are. Radio licenses like that for for public service or for private stuff
19:41
is all on the FCC website you can actually search by location and figure out stuff that's around you that's transmitting figure out what mode they're in if you can listen to it. It's also pretty interesting they give you tower locations how much power each transmitter is using they give you a lot of information on that type of stuff. So here we can see a
20:10
couple of transmitters these look to be digital modes they sort of just look like more intense noise and these require some digital decoding to get any voice or data out of.
20:28
Using these SDRs there are plugins that you can use to decode digital data and the system that police normally use which is called p25 you actually need two SDRs running
20:42
at the same time that's because they have one channel that basically all the radios communicate with and it tells them where in other frequency ranges that they should be talking sort of a command channel and then there's a big swath on either side that lets you actually let is where
21:03
the actual speaking happens. Looks like there's really not that much out there so I can show you give you an idea of where to start if you are looking for stuff around you to listen to. So as I said radio reference is a really great resource they have an enormous list of radio
21:28
frequencies both current and past for pretty much anywhere. I've pulled up Las Vegas here and you can see it's a pretty big list they usually break down by county or city
21:45
and usually on this first page when you click on you'll get all the analog stuff so if there's any police or stuff like that that's still on analog you'll see that here most places have moved completely to digital and if you actually you can see here that there is a communications
22:06
council so it seems like a sort of standard thing anyone within a county will set up a county-wide radio system where it'll retransmit the relevant stuff to whatever repeaters are around there and so when you click on that you can see the frequencies that this is using
22:27
and so this list is actually transmitter sites and the the one in red is actually the control channel so that's going to be a lot of digital data and then all of these other ones are where
22:44
the voice is actually being transmitted some of these use this sort of distributed controlled system on analog and you can sort of bounce around between these and listen to what's going on but most of them are digital but this has this should have pretty much all public safety stuff in the entire county that
23:02
you can listen to you can also pull up hotel frequencies this is a very similar system it has sort of different rooms for different uses and you can you know I would assume that
23:20
the hotels are encrypting their stuff so you probably can't actually listen to it but it can be interesting to sort of bounce around if you don't know what's going on in a frequency or where to look for stuff there's a lot of charts for where the radio waves are allocated some of it's amateur radio military you just really have to sort of dig in what I've found
23:46
is if I find some random transmission on SDR I just put in the frequency in google and usually it'll bring up something at least give you a start put it in FCC pull stuff up there that sort of thing there's actually a pretty good community on reddit for SDR usage a lot of
24:04
these people are doing weather satellite stuff but it's also a decent place for asking for troubleshooting or seeing what issues other people are having and finally I found a decent bit of use on wikipedia it can be a little hard to navigate
24:26
but sort of getting an idea of what radio services are called and then looking those up reading through it going down to the see also section can you lead you down some interesting rabbit holes as far as that goes all right I think that's about all I have I have a couple
24:47
of SDRs to give away so please find me afterwards if you're interested and tell me something interesting that you'd like to do with it but that's all I have thank you