- MCP server with stdio transport for local use - Search episodes, transcripts, hosts, and series - 4,511 episodes with metadata and transcripts - Data loader with in-memory JSON storage 🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code) Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
488 lines
31 KiB
Plaintext
488 lines
31 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 4213
|
|
Title: HPR4213: Making Waves Day 1
|
|
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4213/hpr4213.mp3
|
|
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 21:30:23
|
|
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4213 for Wednesday, the 25th of September 2024.
|
|
Today's show is entitled Making Waves Day 1.
|
|
It is part of the series' interviews.
|
|
It is hosted by Ken Fallon and is about 39 minutes long.
|
|
It carries a clean flag.
|
|
The summary is The Hallway Track from Spectrum Day 1.
|
|
Hi everybody.
|
|
My name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
|
|
Today from the hallways of Spectrum 24, the conference for the creative use of the radio
|
|
spectrum in open systems with the title Making Waves.
|
|
That was held last weekend, which was the 14th and 15th of September in a small town just
|
|
outside of Paris.
|
|
If you've been to Foster M and have been at the Amtra Radio area or the radio area itself,
|
|
you'll get a feel for what they were trying to achieve here.
|
|
There were a lot of really cool projects, so I will introduce some of those projects
|
|
to you now in short little snippet interviews.
|
|
The presentations that people gave will be available on the conference website.
|
|
So without further ado, sit back, relax and enjoy the presentation.
|
|
We're at Spectrum 24, I'm talking to.
|
|
Sylvan, I'm a Fox 4 Golf Kilohadio, the president of the IARU, Region 1.
|
|
Excellent.
|
|
Why are you here today?
|
|
Because this is an event organized by some Amtra Radio guys, but it's not only dedicated
|
|
to Amtra Radio, it's dedicated to innovation and things that could look strange but could
|
|
be of interest for the Amtra community, so that sounds interesting.
|
|
Sounds like hacking to me.
|
|
Well, I didn't want to use that word, you did.
|
|
And what is your background in Amtra Radio?
|
|
Oh, my background is more on SDR, in fact, I'm a software developer.
|
|
And I decided to have my license because I needed to test my code, so I wanted to do this
|
|
with real service, just to have the permits.
|
|
So we're here because you've been able to get the venue, it's been a great venue.
|
|
How do you feel like it's been going so far?
|
|
Well, that's a very good question to be honest.
|
|
We had no clue how many people would be coming, and we're pleased that guys are coming
|
|
from quite far away are here, in fact.
|
|
The quality of the people here is amazing, the conversations that are going on is just
|
|
mind-blowing.
|
|
Yeah, that's true, that's exactly why we wanted to do this, just basically to make people
|
|
don't know each other, start discussions and exchanging ideas, that was just the main
|
|
goal, in fact.
|
|
And you mentioned it in your presentation, the field is very much like the Amtra Radio
|
|
track on Fostem, but even more Amtra Radio, even more, or AFI.
|
|
Yeah, exactly.
|
|
The idea was to dedicate two days to people coming from different communities, and having
|
|
just one coming background, which is Waves, that's why this making Waves name came.
|
|
That was, the intention is make waves, use the spectrum for things that are just fun.
|
|
Okay, perfect.
|
|
I have one serious question, I really hope this is going to be happening again.
|
|
Is this one other thing, or are we planning on reinventing the wheel, or is it too early?
|
|
No, it's not.
|
|
No, the intention is a start.
|
|
We said yes, if we have a few guys who made the effort to come, then it's worth doing
|
|
it again.
|
|
Thanks to the others, we have already received the proposal to host this next time.
|
|
So...
|
|
Excellent.
|
|
Okay, I'll let you go, because I know you're trying to gather people around here, and
|
|
people are just ambling in still, so thank you very much for your time and enjoy the
|
|
rest of the event.
|
|
Thank you very much.
|
|
See you soon.
|
|
Hi, we've had the presentation about F4 Kilo Lima Oscar, and I'm talking to one
|
|
of the project members.
|
|
Your name is?
|
|
François Xager Hugo, and five FXH.
|
|
And can you tell the listeners what F4 Kilo is?
|
|
So, F4 Kilo is a big dish of 10 meters to do radio-astromanical observations.
|
|
It's quite old dish, because it has been bought by the Cité des Siens et l'Angusterie
|
|
in Paris in the year, something like 86, 1986, and it has been unused since, during
|
|
30 years, and recently we had renovated it, and it's now fully functional.
|
|
Okay, super.
|
|
It seems like a transparent wire dish, how wide is it?
|
|
Sorry.
|
|
Physically, how big is it?
|
|
It's 10 meters diameter.
|
|
So this is a heavy, big beast of a thing.
|
|
Big baby, yes.
|
|
And it's got motors and controls and all sorts of things.
|
|
We have fully controlled two axes, right ascension and declination, we can fix, for
|
|
example, any, almost any, because we are in the north hemisphere, but a lot of astronomical
|
|
objects during eight hours tracking it.
|
|
Okay, that is, and for those of you listening along, we'll have links in the show notes,
|
|
but every classic science fiction movie where there's an observer on the ground and
|
|
the dish pans in slow motion or in spin-off motion, that's what we're looking at here.
|
|
So what do you use, how did you end up with this dish?
|
|
Are you know, I bought it on Craigslist or on Facebook Marketplace or something?
|
|
It's special, it's with Remy and five CNB, which brought me to his suitcase and it tells
|
|
me, it's a good project, come with me and we did a lot of very, very interesting things
|
|
there.
|
|
So how did you end up getting in possession of the thing?
|
|
What was the use for first?
|
|
It's special, it's, well, it was Bernard F6BVP, we, at some point, he came here, he came
|
|
there and he saw that the antenna was unused and he went to the citadacials and asked
|
|
them if we could do something there and it was started there and after we have renovated
|
|
it and at some point we lost one motor, which was fixed by FabLab the non-ther and after
|
|
and no, we are fully functional to axis and we can fix any, any, any astronomical object and
|
|
listen to the, you know, to the music of the H1 atom.
|
|
Wow, cool, and so in practice, would I be able to use it?
|
|
You can, anybody can be a user, we have some, some, some fronted available by internet and
|
|
abnet and so almost anybody can be a user, you just have to, to, to, to be a, they run to
|
|
the association of course and it's okay for everybody to come.
|
|
And do you need to be a licensed amateur?
|
|
No, no, no, no, because it's only, well, this part is only listening.
|
|
We have some part, maybe you have seen the, so in the presentation, so you have some
|
|
earth moon, earth communication, but well, the part I am doing is essentially radio astronomy.
|
|
Shall we get your cold pilot in?
|
|
Yeah, of course.
|
|
Hi, sorry, I'm springing this on you, you get the presentation on, on the satellite.
|
|
So what's your name, introduce yourself?
|
|
Oh, yeah, I'm Jules, I got five call signs, but you can just call me IEY, I'll do it.
|
|
Okay.
|
|
F4, IEY, and well, yeah, I'm, I'm indeed like a, a member of F4KLO, like I've been the
|
|
member for no long time, actually, I just discovered the club, like, something like three
|
|
months ago, something like that, I was, because I'm a V, I'm a VE and we organize sessions
|
|
with Remy and the radio club and it was actually different, very first time I like got to
|
|
see the whole set of things and I saw like the whole potential and stuff and I was like,
|
|
okay, well, no, let's just fire it up and try some of the things and as I'm a CW operator
|
|
mainly, that's my main thing.
|
|
So I, I tried to at least put like a decent set up for it.
|
|
So that you're from the VE is Canada and CW is more skilled, I guess.
|
|
Yeah, CW is in the Morse code and V is not Canada, V is for volunteer examiner and
|
|
yeah, it's, it's like an organization to how people passing the American license and
|
|
you can basically do that in every country, which you just need like to belong to an
|
|
organization and then you just like schedule sessions and people come on and you know,
|
|
pass the exam.
|
|
Can you do the exam online?
|
|
Maybe I'm detouring into another topic, does it interest me?
|
|
Yeah, just real quick, you technically can, we just as an organization do not offer
|
|
that, there's like plenty of other that does.
|
|
But for now, we just like doing the, you know, in person exams.
|
|
So the presentation you gave yesterday was there anything that you want to do, you mentioned
|
|
here?
|
|
Well, basically, you have a lot of things that I already presented that maybe a little
|
|
bit more detail about the, I'm sorry, the EME set up because there's like another,
|
|
like a plane of other things, I'm, I'm going to see that you guys in Morse code kind of
|
|
course.
|
|
So yeah, I'm mainly using, let's say a key, like the micro key or two in the rig, but
|
|
there's like other people using the Q65 and you know, digital mode and they're all like
|
|
all PC plugged in.
|
|
They use the SDR or speed to do to like listen to all the signals and compensate a lot of
|
|
factors like Doppler and goes and stuff and it's actually very interesting, but it doesn't
|
|
like, it doesn't bring you to same feeling as doing a CW contact over moon because over
|
|
the moon, right?
|
|
Okay.
|
|
I was going to try and drop that in there.
|
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like CW contact over the moon, you can hear yourself back, which
|
|
is very cool.
|
|
Like the first time due to the speed of light, the amount of time it takes.
|
|
Like the moon is like three hundred thousand kilometers away.
|
|
So yeah, the around trip takes two seconds and yeah, Q65 is not the same thing because
|
|
you don't hear anything.
|
|
Just look at the screen and you know, you do contacts like you click in.
|
|
It's not my, not my type really.
|
|
Fantastic.
|
|
Listen, links to the presentation will be in the show notes for this episode was the
|
|
round thing else that you wanted to mention?
|
|
Apart from the fact that we are focused on, on, you know, amateur radio and space, I'll
|
|
just, for all the radio amateurs here, more than the HF community, this is a great opportunity
|
|
for you to discover, you know, amateur in space and especially EME, which is a very
|
|
specific part, but I'm sure you're going to like it.
|
|
Cool stuff.
|
|
Thank you very much for taking the time.
|
|
I'm talking to Antoni and you have just given a presentation, what was your presentation
|
|
about?
|
|
I am a teacher at Le Mans, Lissé Touchard Washington, I learn electronics and IT computing and
|
|
I build, I'm a radio at school, to interest student, to radio communication and learn
|
|
to build antennae, how to make a QSO and simply in QSO and build some project with, for
|
|
example, a Raspberry Pi and Arduino to make a receiver, a transmitter and to prepare
|
|
them to get the license.
|
|
So it's a voluntary course, you're a teacher I presume and presumably you have, you teach
|
|
computers or something.
|
|
Yes, yes, I teach electronics and computer technology.
|
|
But there is one hour per week to...
|
|
The extra collicular stuff, yes.
|
|
Okay, and it's free for all of students, but the time is not included in their timetable.
|
|
So it's difficult for me to get in the radio room and the interest to come back the next
|
|
week.
|
|
Exactly, so you don't definitely don't have enough time to do a course, but you're planting
|
|
the seeds to get them interested in technology.
|
|
You had some Raspberry Pi's there, I saw some balloons, I saw you had a 2 meter antenna
|
|
tell us a little bit about the cell-up and some of the technologies you're using.
|
|
For the weather balloon, it's very easy because we can include the project of the weather
|
|
balloon in the air exam at the end of the year.
|
|
So the project balloons are included in their time, there is about 6 hour per week to
|
|
study and to prepare the launch and the student will the cards and make all the programming
|
|
with ESP32, Raspberry Pi or Arduino.
|
|
So there's more time for that project than there would be.
|
|
Yes, because we include the project into ESP32.
|
|
And you've got a server rack there, all you seem to be able to use a lot of information
|
|
that was available on the web.
|
|
Yes, I publish a lot of articles and the articles you find in England, USA, France,
|
|
Spain, Europe, the trend and Belgium.
|
|
I wrote a lot of tutorials to get more easy, easy to build something for a person who
|
|
don't know the radio techniques.
|
|
It's a fantastic presentation, hopefully there will be a link to it in the show notes
|
|
for this episode.
|
|
Is there anything else you wanted to mention?
|
|
No, I think there is another project.
|
|
I am also a fan of retro computing and I build my own ORIK1 and ORIK Atmos.
|
|
This is an old computer, but I am a fan of that.
|
|
I look forward to getting you to do an interview or an episode on Hacker Public Radio about
|
|
that in the future.
|
|
Thank you very much for your time and enjoy the rest of the show.
|
|
Can you introduce yourself?
|
|
Yes, my name is Mike Swingey, Oscar III, Mike Zulu-Charlie, and I am the president of
|
|
the Institute of Citizen Science for Space and Wireless Communication.
|
|
We are presenting Meshcom, which is our Mesh network using Laura Modulation on the
|
|
70cm band.
|
|
So what's the Laura device just in case?
|
|
A lot of our guys are not amateur radio operators, yes.
|
|
So can you give us a brief rundown of what a Laura module is?
|
|
And do you actually need a license to run Laura?
|
|
Actually these Laura modules, there is a couple of them available on the market.
|
|
It's from Lily Goh and from Rack and Haltek and just the name of you.
|
|
So it's T-Lora and T-Pee and some other models.
|
|
So it's a cheap combination of a Laura module, so the transmitter and receiver itself,
|
|
and an ESP32 CPU.
|
|
So you have some peripherals, you can add a little battery.
|
|
And by doing so, you have a tiny little module which actually will enable you to transmit
|
|
short messages, but also telemetry data from sensors and others.
|
|
But also your GPS position obviously.
|
|
And by transmitting them via a spread spectrum, Laura Modulation, you can even achieve with
|
|
low power a long range.
|
|
So we are talking 20 kilometers or even more.
|
|
So they are very popular in the IoT field and in farming and they are all over the shop.
|
|
And when something becomes popular, it becomes cheap.
|
|
And therefore you step in with your project.
|
|
Exactly, so the availability of these cheap modules, they actually encouraged us to look
|
|
into it more deeply and think what we actually could do with them in order to experiment
|
|
in amateur radio, but also in hecka space or whatever.
|
|
And the interesting thing about this is actually that it is a mesh network.
|
|
So it forms a mesh network, you don't need any centralized server.
|
|
Every and each node that you switch on is actually automatically a repeater and will repeat
|
|
your message and will so increase the range and the coverage area.
|
|
So if you can get 5 kilometers between two, you can get 10 kilometers, 20 kilometers,
|
|
ideal for disaster situation, I reckon.
|
|
Exactly, we are using it as a completely independent network for disaster relief situations,
|
|
floodings, like unfortunately we have some flooding in Austria and some parts of Europe right
|
|
now.
|
|
So that's whenever you are losing the telephone connection and the internet, then that's
|
|
a perfect fallback thing.
|
|
Although we also have centralized components, you don't need to have them, but we connect
|
|
using HamNet and also the internet.
|
|
So some broadband, we connect the lower clouds, the local and regional lower clouds, we connect
|
|
them to a centralized server.
|
|
And so you can even interconnect the different regional clouds and in order not to spam all
|
|
the different clouds with different languages and different messages, which you probably
|
|
don't want to see.
|
|
You can even filter them by using the talk group system that we all know from the DMR system.
|
|
So for example the talk group 232 would filter all the Austrian messages.
|
|
And even though I am here in Paris or around Paris in France, I can actually listen to my
|
|
friends messages from Austria.
|
|
Just by using this talk group as a filter in the Meshcom network.
|
|
So just for the guys who are not Ham's, what can they expect is that we are not talking
|
|
voice communication here is mostly text.
|
|
Yes, even though you can use voice to text input facilities, what you transmit and what
|
|
we transmit is actually text and data.
|
|
So it's not broadband, it is a narrow band communication.
|
|
So we are talking about speed levels of 1200 bits per second.
|
|
But on the other hand it is very, very reliable, so very low power, so battery will last a
|
|
lot a long time.
|
|
And on the other hand you can send these typical chat messages that you would send via WhatsApp
|
|
or telegram or signal or whatever, which is something that everybody is used to do and
|
|
a lot of also family communication these days using it.
|
|
So why not using it in amateur radio or in disaster relief operation.
|
|
And the devices will go through your table here, but the devices are small enough to put
|
|
in into a lunch box and put on the top of a hill somewhere tall building if necessary.
|
|
I see here that you got like an ESP RM 18650 battery and there is a ESP 32 with a device
|
|
on top of it.
|
|
Do you know what I'll do?
|
|
I'll take some photos and put them into the show notes.
|
|
Yeah, I can give you some more description on that.
|
|
So actually there is a little display, but it's not meant to interact with the user via
|
|
this little display.
|
|
It is meant to connect your smartphone to it.
|
|
So via Bluetooth on the smartphone app you actually use the functionality and the little
|
|
module is only the transmitter for sending and receiving the Laura's signals.
|
|
So you could install the app on say okay there is a point you need to be an amateur radio
|
|
licensee in order to operate the network.
|
|
This project actually addresses amateur radio, but the principle can be used by everybody.
|
|
It's just a legal question of access to the spectrum, but it's free and open source.
|
|
You can get it on GitHub and you can also use it on 868 megahertz, for example, which
|
|
is a free frequency.
|
|
So it's not a particular closed system for radio emitters, but it is focused on radio emitters.
|
|
So what is the focus?
|
|
The focus is experimenting.
|
|
So we want to see which signal has propagated, what way using which repeaters, which mountain,
|
|
and how to improve it and things like that.
|
|
So that is in our focus and that was leading to this development.
|
|
And also let me mention that we have connected it, interconnected it to other radio amateur
|
|
radio systems like APRS, VIN link, like DMR texting, sending SDS, also via tetra radios
|
|
and things like that.
|
|
Or even pages.
|
|
You can use these POXARC pages.
|
|
So the strengths of this system lies also in the interconnection with other already existing
|
|
amateur radio systems, which allows us to use all the tools that we have already built
|
|
for them.
|
|
So for example, for APRS, there is APRS.fi, a very well-known website where you can have a
|
|
look at the GPS positions, but also you see the telemetry already with very nice graphs
|
|
and everything, history is there and a lot of things we don't need to recreate this again
|
|
for Meshcom.
|
|
We can use the existing tools and systems.
|
|
That's one of the benefits of this Meshcom 4.0 we call it, system, and yeah, it has
|
|
a lot of fun and it's open, so free to experiment.
|
|
It also got not just a dashboard where you can, you know, these dashboards from the DMR world
|
|
and the D star and all these digital voices stuff, you also got a dashboard for Meshcom
|
|
and your lower messages and that's something that fits very well into the world of amateur
|
|
radio.
|
|
How would this compare to something like Meshtastic?
|
|
Yeah, the comparison is that the idea is very similar.
|
|
Again, what we have done is we also have some centralized servers where we can interconnect
|
|
the clouds, so that is something we have learned also from digital voice but also from
|
|
HamNet, so we have our own broadband network in Europe, so why not use it for this and
|
|
so you can actually interconnect local nodes and local Mesh networks to other parts of
|
|
the world by simply using the Internet or the HamNet.
|
|
So this is one of the significant differences.
|
|
The other one is this approach of unified communication, so for example, you got interlinks
|
|
to all the other existing amateur radio communication means like APRS and windlink and as I mentioned.
|
|
Yeah, that makes it certainly very flexible and we will see what's up to come.
|
|
Next.
|
|
Can you walk us through some of the devices that you have, we've already looked at the
|
|
Meshcom device with the battery.
|
|
Yeah, there is basically two different devices.
|
|
One is these devices which are from Lilligo like T-beam and T-Lora, so the only difference
|
|
is the size of the battery probably and the T-beam also includes some GPS on board, so that
|
|
makes it a little bit more bulky, so to say, but still a very nice size.
|
|
The other one is very small and uses the GPS information from your phone because it's connected
|
|
to your phone anyway, so why not use it?
|
|
And then there is a lot of health tech devices which are also very flexible and cheap.
|
|
And then for the gateway, I mentioned that you can connect your local node and your local
|
|
cloud to a server, we do that by using gateways and then we use rack modules from the company
|
|
rack.
|
|
It's up to you to choose and there is plenty of things to choose.
|
|
By the way, to set it up is very easy, connect to the website of icssw.org, use the web
|
|
flesher and connect to the correct comport and up you go, just enter your call sign or
|
|
name and the messages are ready to be sent.
|
|
How much is one of these devices just?
|
|
I don't know, it's probably between, I don't know, 40 euro and 50 euro or something like
|
|
that.
|
|
So it depends a little bit, we buy them in on the market so wherever you get it is free
|
|
to use.
|
|
And also you can include some sensors, so there are these typical sensors like the PPM,
|
|
280 or whatever, so it will include temperature and humidity and pressure and I don't know
|
|
what.
|
|
And that could be easily be fit to these modules and on the website you will find instructions
|
|
about the wiring and things like that.
|
|
Fantastic, thanks very much.
|
|
Was there anything else that you wanted to cover into that we skipped over?
|
|
Just let me mention that there is not just a connection via Bluetooth with the app, but
|
|
you can also make these modules to create a Wi-Fi access point, so then there is a web
|
|
server and like you are used to set up your router or any other device, just connect to
|
|
this web server to the web page with your browser and you can do all the same things, so set
|
|
it up, configure and also send and to receive messages.
|
|
Perfect.
|
|
Thank you very much for your time, it was an excellent presentation, links for this will
|
|
be in the show notes for this episode, so hopefully we get to talk to you next year.
|
|
So welcome, thank you very much for the opportunity, no problem.
|
|
And can again live here doing the whole way track at Spectrum 24 and move it over to our
|
|
neighbors here at the HPR booth and we are with the sat down guys, so can you introduce
|
|
yourself first?
|
|
My name is Jakobo, I am from Italy, I am a ham guy that develops the scientific side of
|
|
the sat down software and with me we have also three other developers and one of them
|
|
is right next to me and hello, my name is Bigniew Stanga, I am from Poland, I am developing
|
|
sat down together with Alan and Jakobo and I work mainly on the calibration so the step
|
|
between decoding the data and making it into something useful for science.
|
|
Super, so let's take one step back, what is sat down?
|
|
Who wants to take that?
|
|
I will take it.
|
|
So sat down is a very flexible software that runs on any computer and on some smartphones
|
|
and tablets as well and it is used to decode live satellite data, recorded satellite data
|
|
that is sent from basically over 90 satellite systems in orbit around Earth and it includes
|
|
like meteorology data, images of the sun, images of the Earth, far away space probes and
|
|
everything in between.
|
|
But surely all that stuff is encrypted and legal to download.
|
|
Fortunately it is not, most of the stuff is completely unencrypted and several of the
|
|
bands are either in the amateur band or in other bands that are meant for direct reception
|
|
such as the popular APT and LRPT weather satellites and the geostation is satellites in orbit
|
|
around many parts of the world so it is completely free to use.
|
|
Do you need to be an amateur radio licensee in order to receive this stuff?
|
|
Absolutely not because it is actually just reception, you don't transmit anything but
|
|
it could be like it was for us, a pathway into radio amateur and into getting an actual
|
|
license once you get the hangout of radio because radio is not just talking, it is many
|
|
more and many much more than that.
|
|
I must admit that my first job in the Netherlands was working on satellite internet so this
|
|
is right up my street, I am trying to be as introductory as possible here for people
|
|
so can you tell me a little bit, you do the software, what else do I need in order to get
|
|
into the hobby?
|
|
Absolute cheapest entry level, I want to get an image of something, what would I need
|
|
to do?
|
|
Well basically all you need is a small antenna and an SDR and SDRs are really cheap nowadays
|
|
you can get an RTL SDR stick for like $20 I think and just a piece of cable and then antenna
|
|
you can literally make it out of wire, just a V-diple with two pieces of wire and that
|
|
is pretty much everything you need, other than a computer of course, a smartphone and with
|
|
that you can get pretty okay images, they of course won't be there, great quality,
|
|
a sat-dump can achieve but they are definitely useful for meteorology and they also just
|
|
look cool.
|
|
It is a good start, but then you start getting interested, what else do we have here at
|
|
the table?
|
|
Well here we have some feeds for higher bands so basically the antennas are more complex,
|
|
you are required to use a dish with a special feed for the higher frequencies that is like
|
|
over gigahertz and a couple of gigahertz, so you definitely need an antenna, you also
|
|
start to need an amplifier and a filter, you can get that on Amazon easily, it's pretty
|
|
available and so let's talk about the dish first, could you use a normal like sat-dump
|
|
satellite TV dish that you can pick up relatively cheap or free?
|
|
Absolutely, anything over 70 or 80 centimeters will be great and you can find the old dish
|
|
your neighbor has.
|
|
So when you say 70 meters you take out a measuring tape and if it's 70 meters, the bigger
|
|
the better with satellite dishes but yes?
|
|
Pretty much yes.
|
|
Okay.
|
|
So then you have the satellite dish, you got one from your neighbors, then what do you
|
|
need next?
|
|
So you need to make actually a feed which is the part that converts the actual radio waves
|
|
into electricity that can be sent to the computer and that can be made really easily if you
|
|
have a 3D printer, but even if you don't have a 3D printer you can just build it yourself,
|
|
I mean it feels out of wood and Lego and you just need a wire which is called in an appropriate
|
|
way and can find the dimensions on the internet very easily.
|
|
So is this a feed here that I'm looking at?
|
|
I'm describing what would essentially be a child's art project, no offense, but it's
|
|
a piece of aluminium, very precision cost with the scissors, by the looks of no offense.
|
|
It does look like something that I could put together, probably not as well.
|
|
And coming out of that is a, what do we call that type of connector?
|
|
To make a connector you can get them for basically peanuts on Amazon.
|
|
Yep, and they're all not really expressing everything.
|
|
And then out of that is what essentially looks like a piece of household electrical wire
|
|
that you might have in the AC adapter for your laptop and that's coiled around very artistically
|
|
around the 3D printed thing, it's about the size of your middle finger I guess and yeah
|
|
it's just a coil wire that if you could possibly even coil it around a toilet roll
|
|
core or something like that.
|
|
And we actually did it already, so.
|
|
Okay, so you've got a toilet roll core, you've got a piece of aluminium foil as ground plane
|
|
and you wrap that around and then you've got an antenna.
|
|
I'm not going to go into polarization at this point, but so we have those two things we have
|
|
our dish, we have our antenna, then what?
|
|
Well, you just need the radio, which can be bought on Amazon, which is as we already said an RTLSDR,
|
|
which is about 30 to 40 euros on Amazon, but you can get it cheaper from China.
|
|
And you just need the computer and the sadam software, which can be of course downloaded for free.
|
|
And those sticks were originally for satellite television, but.
|
|
Yes, they were for terrestrial television and satellite TV, but they can be basically reprogrammed
|
|
very easily with a few clicks or even no clicks if you use macOS or Linux and just work as a satellite
|
|
reception tool. Okay, so that's cool. Now, what else do you have for the real professionals here?
|
|
For the real professionals, you can switch to much higher resolution satellites,
|
|
satellites with a resolution of 60 meters per pixel, so you can see houses and
|
|
ships in the sea and whatnot. And then you can also get the images of the sun,
|
|
you can get space probes, you can get the images of the entire Earth disk, so you can see basically
|
|
the entire Earth illuminated as if you were taking a picture from space. And also you can get radar
|
|
systems and anything in between really. We do support new satellites as they come online and as
|
|
they are launched. That is absolutely amazing. And the presentation was fantastic. From every level,
|
|
no matter what your interest in science and technology, there was something in that presentation
|
|
for you, pity that Alan couldn't be here, but hopefully we'll catch up with him at the next
|
|
spectrum 24. So tell me what we have, what are you demoing here on the table?
|
|
We are demoing several new technologies. One of them is an expand, so very high resolution,
|
|
very high data rate receptions set up that can be used to receive the very juicy high-detail
|
|
satellites like the ones in Google Earth. And we are actually working to bring that to the
|
|
masses with the introduction of cheaper components that you can buy in a few months probably.
|
|
What's a copyright on those then? They are basically free to use because they are taken by an
|
|
automated satellite. They are meant to be received by actual end users, even though nobody knows
|
|
about that. It's actually called direct broadcast for a reason in the spectrum.
|
|
So, because they haven't been manipulated, it's not possible to copyright them.
|
|
Absolutely. Absolutely.
|
|
Basically, they are copyrighted by the satellite operators, but you can use them. They can't
|
|
prevent you from using them and it's completely legal, but you have to acknowledge that they come
|
|
from this specific mission. Okay, I'll need to get my head around that particular one, but that's
|
|
quite interesting. Yes, yes. My presentation yesterday was more or less on copyright.
|
|
We're almost finished. We're being bugged to go back in, but it's a good time to wrap this up
|
|
because otherwise I would go on for ages on this topic. Listen guys, anything else you want to
|
|
point out here or anything else that I missed? Just go on our website, satnam.org and you can find
|
|
any information you need, including easy to understand guides to get into the Hoppy.
|
|
Yes? Absolutely. Okay, okay. Thank you very much.
|
|
Gentlemen, and I'll talk to you later. So that was most of the presentations from day one of
|
|
the conference, and tomorrow we will be posting day two coverage. So tune in then for another exciting
|
|
episode of Hacker Public Radio.
|
|
I just can, with our continuing coverage of the hallway track at Spectrum 24. Sit back and enjoy.
|
|
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio. Does it work?
|
|
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording
|
|
or cast, you click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
|
|
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the internet archive, and our
|
|
sing.net. On this address status, today's show is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
|
|
International License.
|