Remember the message, the future is not set.
Testing.
Whoa, that's loud.
Hey, everybody.
How's it going?
First of all, I just want to reiterate everything that Johnny said is completely true.
I go give, like, talks to college students and high school students about career advice and computer science, and I feel like all the computer science professors look at me with, like, a rash of horror when I don't say the most important programming language or,
you know, the most important operating system, the most important thing to learn.
Because in reality, it is how to be a people person, because no matter how good you are at computers, the best people that you hire in a consulting role, especially pen testing, is somebody that can talk to a human and tell them why everything's broken,
but make them not hate you.
So yeah, that is my number one advice, is the book, learn how to, what is it, whatever book Johnny recommended, highly recommend it.
And then also on top of that, just be nice, like, the amount of times that you can just be nice to somebody and it gets you really far, just do it.
So anyways, we're not going to be talking about being nice, we're going to be talking about talking to satellites with measuring tape, so...
First of all, raise your hand if you're a ham radio operator.
All right, we got one, we got two, we got three, okay, we got a handful.
Raise your hand if you have one of your HF licenses.
Okay, a couple less, sweet.
You only need your technician, so you only need your very first license to do anything that we're going to talk about.
I want to stress that before we start talking about this, that in order to do anything in this talk, you need to have your technician ham license, but after that, it's gravy.
All right, so we're going to be talking about how to talk to satellites with a measuring tape, specifically this is going to be talking about the International Space Station.
Typically when I talk about this amongst friends and family, and they ask, why do you care?
Why is this a thing that you do?
And I go, well, because it's cool.
There's not a ton of practical application to it.
I mean, I think there is, but you can make the argument to your wife, your spouse, whoever your non-technical friend is, it's like, well, I have an iPhone, I can FaceTime anybody on the globe at any point I want, and it's like, yeah, but that defeats the purpose.
That has a whole network behind it.
That has a whole communication underlying infrastructure behind it.
This is, you can communicate using a single other relay point to anywhere else within probably around a thousand mile radius.
So when people ask me, like, okay, so who cares, you know, why?
The answer is because it's cool and it can help you sharpen your technical expertise and your technical skills.
So in just a nutshell, this is going to be specifically talking about the International Space Station.
On board the International Space Station, they have a ham radio that will digi-peat.
Digi-peat is, it will, if it receives a signal, it will basically tag on some of its own metadata to that signal, and it will then repeat it back down to the globe, to the, you know, it's what it can see, right?
Now the ISS, it orbits, you know, not as high as many people think, and so it can, it still has a pretty darn good radius of what it can see if you were on the International Space Station.
Looking down, you can typically see, like, the entire continental United States, right?
So it's one of those things that with a small handheld device, you now can communicate to anybody else within that same, that same circle, right?
So we'll go over the how and the why, the gear, the software that's needed for it, really the skills, the timing, there's a lot of timing that goes into this, and how not to be a jerk when you do this.
So a little bit, a little bit about this, it's, if you were to look at the website, if you were to go Google AR ISS, there's a web, a webpage that you can see all the current individuals that have transmitted up to the ISS, their call sign, all their kind of relevant information,
their communication.
It's educational.
It's all community driven.
That's one of the things that I love about ham radio, is that it is the, like, one of the best communities, one of the absolute nerdiest communities in the entire world.
I've never seen, you know, people be more interested or light up more when you show them an antenna than a ham radio operator, and it could be for something as, you know, dumb and small as some little mesh-tastic node, ham radio operators love to geek out on all things,
which I think is why they make great hackers, because they're some of the original hackers out there.
So this will all focus on two-meter packet radio.
We'll go into that a little bit more, and the ISS, it also has some other operating modes on it, and a lot of crew members on the ISS are actual ham radio operators as well.
Now, obviously, it's a rarity that you're going to be able to speak to anybody on the ISS.
They have very important jobs to do, and their schedules are done minute by minute, but if you go on YouTube and you search, you know, talking to an astronaut or something along those lines, there are, you know, ham radio operators that they have a perfect pass of when the ISS is coming over,
they'll be in the middle of a cornfield, and they'll chat with an astronaut for, you know, a couple of minutes while, you know, while they're in their horizon, while everything is, like, set up and oriented properly.
Because the funny part about this is you think of the International Space Station, it's orbiting at a couple hundred miles, right, above us, but that means it is screaming fast when it's going over you.
I think it's going at roughly 17,000 miles an hour.
So when you imagine that screaming across, you know, the sky, you're having to track it, you know, or do a decent good job about tracking it if you want to lock on that signal.
And then you get other interesting things they'll talk about, like Doppler shift and what that means and what that does to some of your frequencies.
So in order to do that, like I said, you're going to need your ham radio license.
You can receive, now you can listen all day long without your ham radio license.
So if you want to listen to HF, you want to listen to, you know, any VHF, UHF, any of that kind of stuff, you can listen every single day without a license.
It's only when you transmit.
And some people don't quite understand why that matters.
Well, if you're listening, you're not impacting anybody else.
You're not impacting the airspace.
You can listen every single day to that.
But the moment that you key up, the moment that you transmit on any of those frequencies, now you make them potentially unusable to anybody else.
So if you don't know what you're doing, you plug in an amplifier of a couple hundred watts, you could make, you know, that band, that whole area, that whole setup completely unusable to anybody in your local vicinity or sometimes, you know, for certain segments of the globe even,
depending on what you're doing.
So just know that that is why your license is required for that, and it is not at all hard to get your license.
If you've thought, man, you know, I've always kind of been interested in it and I really want to, it is probably one of the easiest tests in the entire world.
The entire question set is online.
There is an app that for like 99 cents will walk you through flashcards of all the questions, and in about a couple hours of studying, you can easily get your technician license.
So if any of you have passed the drive test, I promise you, you can also pass your first, you know, technician ham radio license.
And it's important to get that.
It's important to not make the airspace unusable for everybody else.
So I think that once you do it, you'll find that it can be really fun and really nerdy, and people are going to ask you a lot of questions.
So talking about, you know, how you do this, what, you know, what the kind of different frequencies, things to Google are going forward, this is in the two meter band, and, you know, ham radio operators, this confused me for the absolute longest time,
is that you can see 144 megahertz, and somebody is like, yeah, you mean the two meter band, right?
I never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever understood that until you look at this simple equation, right?
Speed of light, wavelength, times frequency.
And so you can swap those all out.
And so when people say two meter band, they're doing the math of it and saying, oh, well, if you take the speed of light, divide it by the frequency, that comes out to roughly two meters, right?
And you might be thinking, well, for 144 megahertz, does that mean every antenna for that is two meters?
Absolutely not.
You can do them in...
And those numbers work well in, like, multiples, so, like, you know, you can say, you might hear quarter wave, half wave, those are basically that two meters, and it's a quarter of, you know, it's a quarter of two meters, right?
So 50 centimeters.
Did I do that math right?
Yeah, I did.
Yeah, you're doing it on stage.
What's worse than doing demo gods is, you know, doing math wrong on stage, especially when it's simple deficient.
So keep this in mind, that when you hear, say, somebody say, like, oh, 70 centimeter band or, you know, two meter band, that's what they're talking about, is that they're just interposing that with what the actual wavelength is, or sorry, what the actual frequency is of what you're transmitting on.
And so kind of going forward on that, it's on FM.
And so all FM is, is if you look, if you think of, like, a slinky in the way that radio waves kind of work, AM is you're shaking that slinky up and down, it's, you know, moving, you know, up and down kind of in your X axis, right?
Whereas FM, what's happening is you are modulating frequency, so you are going, you know, you're increasing and decreasing the frequency ever so slightly within your main range in order to get that communication across.
That's one of those things, too, that I know that trips up a lot of beginners of, you know, AM versus FM, and they're entirely different, and if you try and broadcast on, you know, if you try and modulate it in the wrong way, then whoever's trying to receive it is not gonna know and not gonna understand.
They might still hear something, but it'll be garbled if they can't decode it properly.
So just kind of keep that in mind, that when you're looking at this, this is the two-meter band, so, you know, 144 megahertz, it's FM, and we'll talk about the baud rate here in a second.
So two-meter band, when you're broadcasting, you're gonna do this at 1200 baud, and it's, you just think of pulses, right?
And early modems were one bit per baud.
And this is ultimately under packet radio, so if you just, you know, Google, look up anything, AX25, this is kind of the packet radio system that is used on board the ISS.
It's also known as APRS.
It's used for a lot of other packet reporting stuff.
You know, you can, I'm sure if you had some capacity to listen to it right now that you'd hear it in your area.
Packet radio is really nice, I really like APRS just in general, because it's an easy way to become a ham radio operator, because it's all digital, right?
It's all just digital bits and bytes going across the air, versus, you know, having to key up and like say, hey, this is Whiskey Delta, right, and like having to ramble it all off.
If you have some older, you know, Elmer ham radio operators out there, they know how to say that flawlessly, and that's one of those things that I always choked up, and that was also one of the reasons why I never wanted to be a ham radio operator.
I didn't want to like, I was super nervous, just like, oh, I'm gonna like take up a bunch of air time, and a bunch of people are gonna hear me mess up, right?
So it's even better than that, standing up on stage and talking about it, or somebody's gonna correct your math.
And so, effectively, the ham radio onboard the International Space Station, I believe it's a Kenwood, it uses packet radio, it uses APRS on its own frequency, that it will repeat your own signal back down, so it'll digipede it.
So what that basically means is that if you, so normally if I were to say, send a message to somebody on the other side of the room, or somebody on the other side of the city, that message would go from there.
Now, APRS, it will make multiple hops, so you can think of that as like, there's a repeater in between.
That's all the International Space Station is, is acting as a repeater.
And what is the best place, or where is the best place to put a repeater?
Somewhere really high.
What gets higher than the International Space Station?
Not a lot, unless it's like a geostationary satellite, but ultimately that's what makes it the perfect, the perfect place for a repeater, is because it is as high as you can realistically get, you know, anything that you can use for free anyways.
So, if you look at APRS, it's broken down into several frequencies, each kind of region has its own.
They're all still in the two meter band, so there's still that 144 megahertz, but they're all kind of offset by a little bit.
So that way, you know, you can kind of look at the region, so if you're, I don't know, in Europe, if you're in South America, for whatever reason, you're on vacation, you notice you're not getting any APRS packets, that's probably why, just go check your frequency.
So the way, the way that like, this works at a very, very high level, is you have your computer, I just use a Raspberry Pi, but you can even use a cell phone now, they have APRS apps that you can use, basically just something that converts the audio that you hear into the actual digital signal that then your computer can look at,
you know, the actual words that you can see.
So if you hear like the noise of an APRS, like what it sounds like, you'll never forget it, and every time you hear it, like in a movie, or like, there's actually been a lot of information disclosures, if you go like watch YouTube of like certain, certain like military,
naval stuff, you'll hear, you'll hear that, and if you were to hold up your phone or some other packet decoder to it, you can actually decode whatever they were playing at that point in time, so there's some really interesting, really kind of funny information disclosures that only super nerds that hear that,
you know, hear that tone and they recognize it, it's similar to the dial tone that you used to hear when you, you know, hooked up a dial-up modem.
But it takes that, plus your computer, and you can have an optional GPS on board if you want to kind of, to relay your location.
A lot of ham radio operators will have this in their car so that they can do like, so they can like track vehicles, track, you know, weather balloons, that sort of a thing.
I actually have a really good friend of mine, she, before she could get her driver's license, her dad made her get her ham radio license, and it was so she could have an APRS deal in her, you know, device in her car, so that he could see like, oh, when did she leave school,
when did she do this, you know, all way before the days of, you know, find my, find my, on, you know, the iPhone, right?
Much nerdier, but I also thought it was really funny that you have this, this girl who cares not at all for ham radio, and, you know, she has her extra class license, just, I always gigger about it every time I see her.
So again, what I use is I use the Raspberry Pi, I like being able to SSH in remotely and access it that way.
You can definitely use your phone, too.
And then you can even, like, I've even seen people, they'll hold up their phone to their Baofeng radio, and so the audio that comes off of the Baofeng will then be picked up by the microphone that is on the actual phone itself, and obviously you're going to get signal degradation in there,
but in a pinch you can do that to use it to decode and encode, and typically what you want is there's an audio cable that will go, you know, either microphone jack or lightning jack into the, you know, the side of your Baofeng radio.
Now, I throw Baofeng out there, a lot of people, if you're not a ham radio operator, people really hate this radio.
It's, you know, made of, like, I mean, it's not the best quality build, but it's like $20 on Amazon, right?
So it's one of those things that I have a love -hate relationship with it.
On one hand, you know, could it be better quality?
Absolutely.
On the other hand, what is the best way to get somebody involved in ham radio?
And it's by getting them to use a Baofeng, right?
For $20, they can now talk to people, they can now use APRS, they can do a lot of the different things that, you know, maybe if the price tag was $100, $200 for a better handheld that they wouldn't have done during that time.
So that's Baofeng radio, you can go Google it, you can go look it up on Amazon, they're pretty inexpensive.
And I, you know, I'm sure some ham radio operator, you know, is gonna murder me for saying this, but I think they're a good intro, a good way to start.
They're not super high power, but you don't want that when you're just getting started out.
And the power requirements to do this are surprisingly low.
So I think for my handheld, I use typically 5 watts.
I mean, that's less than what, you know, modern gen iPhones charge on, right?
So it's extremely low power for what you can do, what you see some of these other ham radio setups have.
And that's another part of the thing that I like is that, you know, kids can play with it, you know, I can have teenagers, you know, elementary school students, they can all use it and not, you know, have to worry about, you know, any electrical burns,
you know, having to worry about somebody shocking themselves.
It's so low stakes that it's such a good way to start.
And so, again, we talked about APRS.
If any of you are familiar with Meshtastic, very similar.
Meshtastic is like the newer version of APRS kind of in my opinion, and again, gonna get shot for saying that.
But essentially the way that it works is it works kind of like a hopping system.
So by default, I believe APRS, it'll do three hops.
So you send a message and that message will hop around, you know, three times.
Each time it hops, the repeater will then subtract one from the headers of it essentially, and then that means that it kind of decrements as it goes out, and so it'll only go so far before the signal kind of dies out.
And the special kind of thing about that is that you can have a very small handheld unit, and if your first hop out, so the first, you know, message that gets received is up on a hill somewhere, that might be a much more powerful repeater with much more power,
it might be in a good position, high up, good antennas, all of that kind of stuff, right?
And then you basically get to piggyback on that, you know, that system that somebody's put up that potentially costs several thousands of dollars.
And if you want to talk about the most expensive ham radio, you can talk about the International Space Station, because that's what, the most expensive thing that, you know, expensive object that humanity's ever built, and they slapped a ham radio onto it,
which I think is the coolest thing in the entire world.
And so when you look at it, the ISS, as it's, you know, orbiting above us, there's a very short window when you typically find it.
So we'll talk about the apps and the ways that you can find it.
I like to use an app called GoSatWatch.
They might have a free version, I think they did the paid version.
What's really nice about it is that it'll take your GPS coordinates of where you are, and it will show you over the course of the next week where the ISS currently is, and when it's going to be, you know, above you or orbiting above you at a given point in time.
And the nice part is, is that you can then basically put it in your calendar and schedule it out that, hey, I've got to block out my calendar for 1 p.m., because I know that's when the ISS is going to be right overhead.
Or if you're with your kids and you're like, oh, this might be kind of neat, you can at nighttime, if you find a good evening pass, you can go out on a clear night and you can see it, you know, up over the horizon and where it goes.
Now, typically when you want to do this is you want the ISS to get as close to you as possible without getting into a lot of geometry.
That's typically when it's about right overhead.
That's also the easiest to transmit to, because it's, you know, you can kind of point in a general direction.
So basically looking at that, there's a website that all it does is it tracks all the different places that have made communication to the International Space Station.
This is kind of nice because you can see, hey, you can go look up these individuals ' call signs.
You can see their Latin longitude and see how far the active paths that anybody is communicating with at any given point in time.
It's one thing if you're like sitting in Colorado to, you know, be able to repeat to somebody that's in Nebraska.
That's not crazy far.
It is way more interesting if you can find a path where you're maybe on the edge of that circle that is, you know, basically that it is orbiting above and you can hit somebody else on the periphery.
So you can use this website to basically go over and see what are the other ham radio operators out there that are currently actively using it.
And it's also kind of interesting to see other individuals, you know, in the world and, you know, where their communications are coming from.
So the most interesting part about this is basically building your own antenna.
This is kind of when I go back to, you know, ham radio operators and some of the original hackers out there.
There's so many DIY things out there that I just think are so, so interesting as far as a way to get people involved and get people who don't understand technology, ham radio, you know, antennas.
These are all very overwhelming concepts to somebody who's never done them before.
And my goal with doing all this is to say, like, look, with some PVC pipe, you sacrifice a steel measuring tape, and for, like, what, maybe $20, $30 for a bow fang, I mean, they even come down in price.
Like, you're looking for a price tag under $100.
You can get somebody to be able to digi-beat or send, you know, relay communication off the International Space Station.
And if any of you have kids, you know, my kids aren't old enough to where they, you know, can understand anything like this yet.
But if you have, you know, a junior high student, if you have a high school student, these are great ways to just introduce them to the fact that, like, look, you can actually build something, and it can actually work with something else out there in the world.
I think that there's a lot of it right now where it's just like, oh, if you can't, you know, code this new, you know, this new gaming app that has, you know, augmented reality to it, that, like, you're not a good programmer.
In the same way, it's like, oh, if you don't have a giant, you know , antenna tower in your backyard, you're not really a ham radio operator.
You don't really understand.
This is a very easy, like, compact way to get somebody started in this for, like, such a minimal cost.
And so typically under here, if you have a cell phone already, you know, that's no cost.
A Raspberry Pi, you know, if you don't already have one kicking around, you can just use a laptop that you have.
The USB audio card, again, that's like $8 on Amazon.
The audio cable, you know, depending on what you can find at a swap meet or at a Goodwill, right?
Like, all of these things you can source for much cheaper.
This is, like, if you just wanted to go and buy them online.
If you want links to all the hardware, you have the... let me see.
So if you want links to all the hardware, I have it all on that GitHub site.
It should all still be up.
And effectively what you're gonna basically change, and this thing tripped me up for quite some time, too, is doing Vox on your Baufang.
So basically what happens is when you're... when the Baufang basically hears audio, or if it's, you know, piped through the cable, it will then automatically turn it on and start broadcasting.
That's not ideal.
Typically you want, like, some push-to-talk situation, but again, to get started, this is pretty much what you want.
And the way... so if you go look at... so if you go Google Legios Yagi, he has all of the measurements.
He's done all the math and measurements to where you can cut your PVC, you can cut your... you basically... all you're doing is you're cutting this measuring tape down to the very specified lengths, and then you're just, you know, you could either electrical tape it together and just go from there.
And if you cut it to these lengths, you don't even need an antenna tuner typically, because, hey, you're cutting a measuring tape, right?
What's the best device that you can cut?
One that's already self-measuring in and of itself.
Now if you want to, like, make this a little bit nicer and you have a little bit more budget, they sell an antenna that collapses called an arrow antenna.
That is, like, the Cadillac, you know, of all, like, antennas.
I'm sure you'll see it if you Google it.
Oh, I've probably seen that before.
I have one of those, and it's funny because I'll use my arrow antenna, and then the next pass I'll use this, you know, measuring tape Yagi antenna, and they're pretty comparable.
I mean, the Yagi that I made is not as good of quality, but it's one of those things that, like, it's pretty amazing that you have a $150 antenna that's been tuned and it has, like, all the appropriate aluminum cuts and, like, all that stuff to be resonant at that frequency,
and just to show that, like, you know, your measurements are correct, you can do that same thing with one of these, and they're also great for fox hunting, too.
So, anyways, it's an interesting project.
I think you should all try it.
Get your technician license if you don't have one.
Does anybody have any questions?
Sweet.
If you do, you can always go to the SecureWorks SoFlo booth.
I've got to go run the wireless capture of the flag right now, so shameless plug for that.
If you want to enjoy the king of the hill, I recommend checking it out.
Thank you, everybody.