>> Morning! [Cheers and Applause] >> Get my blood pumping! And on that note, I'm out. >> See ya. This is an introduction to software defining radio and the wireless village. And the importance between these two talks or the concepts between these two talks is the -- SDR stuff we debuted at a Def Con last year for us and we had some pretty good presenters and players and all that sort of stuff. And we're hoping to bring everyone in this room into there -- throughout the conference, not at once. So don't rush it. >> So who we are? Well who we are is not entirely too important, but what we do for you is. And what we do for you is provide a safe environment that you can practice all the wifi stuff and the SDR stuff for contests and general experimentation. I'm St. Clouds and this is Kahuna. >> I'm Kahuna and one thing to note is when you do it with us, we keep it legal. So remember that. One of the things you also need to remember it's not just the two of us, there are a lot of people in the background that helps us with this every year. Some of them are here, some of them are not here. Some of them are up getting the wireless village setup now, going through all the contest stuff. Their names are here, not going to read through them but uh -- >> Definitely go meet them. >> You see them, say hello, buy them a drink, especially the girls. They do a wonderful job. So for the next 45 minutes we are going to cover a variety of different things. To get you interested and able to be prepared to play the contests over in the village. It's not just hardware, it's also understanding regarding some basic radio communication concepts. And one of the many things that we see that get people gummed up or jammed up in the competitions that we have is the lack of understanding of the physical layer components of the radio. Which is radio. Interestingly enough. So the agenda that is going to be coming over for you is right there, we're going to establish some basic knowledge. How many Hams do we have in the room? Yeah, awesome sauce. How many are going to become Hams after the conference in this room? How many are going to take an exam if they are going to be able to. >> Point of vanity. All the Hams, raise your hands again. >> All the Hams, raise your hands. >> All of you that are extra, keep your hands up. Those of you that are not, keep your hands down. Thank you gentlemen. Yeah, mics are dead. >> Ironically, wireless! [Laughter] >> Whose jamming us? >> Yeah, alrighty, the clicker is next. >> Don't be concerned if you didn't bring what you need to participate in the contests we're having with you. There are vendors in the vendor area. Some of the ones that we know and have worked with are listed here as well as there is a huge Frys Electronics here in Las Vegas and it's not that far away. We go there at least once every year because we find something we forgot. I'm going to keep rolling. What I'm going to talk about next is transceivers. Those of you that are Hams are familiar with these, these are what's called fixed transceivers, and they're amateur radio transceivers. Frequencies they operate on are HF, UHF, VHF and sometimes multimode. Output power is 100 to 200-watts standard. Camera off DC mobile. These are what is in the -- stations. Cost factor $1,000 and up. Next is mobile. In your car some have radios mounted in our car. These work better than using HT in the car. So you'll see these mounted under the dashboard, in the trunk with remotes and stuff (audio blipped) power less than the other. 12-volts. Run off DC. I know some people that use these for base stations. It's a low entry point to HF radio and VHF and UHF. The last is HT, these are hand-held transceivers. These are amazing. Most people get their first license, the technician class license, you can use these. 2-meters, 70-centimeters and cost, you can get these for about $35. They last a long time. If it breaks (audio blipped) I broke a couple of them, it's 35 bucks. Go buy another one. The high end Japanese ones will run you up to a couple hundred dollars. If you have an interest and don't know if you're interested or not, there is a workshop that is going to go on here. You can find it in the schedule. It's talking about hands sphere. It's a virtualized radio, it's done across the internet. It's an install client on windows and runs on both Mac and Linux and you can get a 30 day trial license on it and you do not need a an amateur license. Go to the workshop if you're interested in this. >> The components of software defined radio. You can replicate all the things that you see and managed on the typical hard ham radios with a variety of soft radios (audio blipped) between when you buy in bulk. Ten dollars to $20 up to the -- RF. This is not a camera. Different radios have different capabilities. Be aware of the capabilities and restrictions. The reason for this, I'm being specific about it, is in the village we have some challenges that are built specifically for you need to have a hacker to solve the challenge or a (audio blipped) to solve the challenge. But don't worry, the prizes are typically the inverse of it. Outside of that you have a major delineator between the variety of different tools available. This is going to be something new for you. Just start off with the real type. You can buy them off of the vendors and in the village for the SDR ones, that will probably get you 60 percent of the available flax. It's easy to get into. The complication of that is the degree of madness. However, these things are out there. This is an awareness campaign. You can see them in demonstration as well. Because they have a speech to text, I have to say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. The hand held transceivers, you can do sat light communications. Earth, moon, earth is interesting. You use the moon as a reflector, send a signal up and it hits the moon and bounces back. [indiscernible] is doing over RF. Radio Teletype which I did many, many (audio blipped) is the old -- code. Sending radio signals across RF. And radio linking project is something fairly new. I'm just getting into it. Essentially you use a low power hand held transceiver and you call to a repeater, that repeater hooks to the internet to another repeater and transmits to someone that you're talking to. The repeaters have four digit IDs and that's part of the transmission that (audio blipped) encoded. You tell it what the code is in those four tones and that is how it recognizes and knows which repeater to send to across the internet. And last but not least is my absolute international Morse code. The oldest means of communication. Not subject to interference and all that other stuff. It will power through anything. Last ditch report for any of those who are real preppers. You should learn Morse code. >> The last thing I want to add on is any challenges and the disciplines in radio as you jump around frequency range, a lot of these basic principles that you learn as a ham radio operator directly apply in one way or another hen looking at signals and analysis. Morse code is one of them. You may have a -- transmitter using oop. If you know Morse code this is an easy one to translate off of. (audio blipped) components that we have available to you, regarding the challenges and the different CR platforms is the ability to transmit and receive. Whether or not it's full or half reflex receiver. The -- is only receiving one. The other can transmit and receive and it's usually portable. The half will do that -- if you're trying to analyze cellular communications you can do it with both -- it requires you to interact with a device, you will more than likely [indiscernible] similarly the SDR app, not only (audio blipped) (audio connection lost). And getting ahead of myself. But the thing to remember is that with a Wi-Fi adapter it has -- running on that radio and it's going to do Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi really well. You can do Wi-Fi with an SDR but there is going to be a huge tax and I haven't seen anything path AM211 be reliable. You can do it with some of the other platforms but you can buy this for $20 or a USRP for $2,500 to do Wi-Fi. Pick the right tool for the right thing. You got to remember how it presents the information to you. It presents the information to you in two components. These are measures of the signal and how they phase with each other so you can reassemble the communication and a fun little program called ham radio companion which is like programming -- [indiscernible] something similar, software defined radio. The new radio companion, there is a series of classes involving that, I believe this year. I personally -- it's a fantastic tool. There are a lot of weird things you have to understand about it. But in some degree I feel like it's a little bit of grad wear. It worked for me, I don't care if it works for you. Just doesn't work on their machine and that can be different -- versions or different radio companion versions. It's getting better. Made massive strives as the community moves forward. But the -- what you're going to need to do and understand with radio companion is how you're collecting that information. So choose your weapon wisely per se. And it has to do with how many samples and how -- in other words how many digits in that quote unquote number are important to you, (lost audio). I have -- there is a neat little effect that happens with software defined radio. Where sometimes in the real world you don't get any -- I'm trying to remember the word. The simple is false signals. What's that? Pyronics (ph.). Thank you. The software component of it can sometimes lie to you. Be aware of that. Sometimes it's better to have two tools to help you out. And last but not least I've seen other people feel they have the right tool to find out they weren't able to remotely tune to what they were looking for and they may have found the signal from it but they're measuring the harmonic from it which is not so good. So as I gave that allusion to at the beginning, the physical layer component of this stuff, the antenna piece to this is very important to understand. When we were at Derby Con last year we had a fox and hound competition and nobody found it. These people had directional antennas and people didn't know that the sound load was making the sound move up and over the shoulder when it was right in front of them. They thought the fox was a restaurant that was closed when in fact it was open all weekend. They think it was at the restaurant but the strongest part of the signal was shooting up and over-behind them. Test your gear, know the gear. Antenna system, so, this is where I get [indiscernible]. I build these things, I design these things. I used to enjoy taking a random piece of wire and tuning it but there are three basic components. (lost audio). Coax cables. Cable TV cable instead of RF cable. 75 ohms, 50 ohms makes a difference. Gain is the ability of an antenna to increase the signal strength or transfer the energy, the RF into the RF electrical and magnetic wave. When you have gain, you're measuring the antennas that everybody uses for wireless are typically 14DBI. A 14-decibel gain over a measured isotropic antenna and the isotropic antenna is a quarter wavelength at that operating frequency. Who has an RF chamber they can test their own [indiscernible] and all that sort of stuff. Know your radio antenna. I see so many of them be poorly performed and people follow the instructions and they have a bad solder joint. >> Horizontal, circular, vertical. The -- polarization in the diagram there. Essentially all antennas boil into two type, omni directional or provide some directionality. Omni directional is reasonable poor in all directions but they're useful. A lot of times in doing fox hunts and stuff you do omni directional and once you're close the directional antenna looks at harmonics and stuff. Using a low gain omni directional helps a lot in those situations. It's useful in most mobile applications. People who put magnetic verticals on top of their cars, those are omni directional because you want to pick up signals from everywhere. Directional signals. It's showing the decibel gain over the isotropic. This is just a radiation pattern chart. You can see the cyclones so you can determine why some people may think an antenna or transmitter is over here when actually it's over here. They may think it's over there when it's over here. You need to know your antenna systems, how they operate and what characteristics they provide. Speaking of characteristics there is a sky wave. Sky wave is used for most very long haul transmissions. When you transmit a radio wave it go everywhere based on the antenna. A directional antenna, you focus it that way, it travels from the earth's surface all the way up straight down depending on the antenna. And some of that (lost audio connection) >> So let's talk about some of the things regarding these little devices that you need to be conscious of when using an -- those things -- or when you want to test the stuff at your house. For the village we have a variety of webpages with take home exams and practice exams so you can do this stuff at home and test it at home. Once you have that scratch and itch you'll be curious about the other things that are happening around your residence from an RF transmission standpoint. Some of these are lessons that I learned and others learned. Lightening static, noise and [indiscernible] so we'll get to that. With the typical RTLs they come with these goofy antenna nubs and they're junk. Many people will plug in their RTL and plug in the antenna that comes with it and they wonder why they're not really picking anything up at all. That is a great photograph of an example as to why they don't pick anything up at all. Anyone see a problem with this? It works better if you plug it in. In some cases the solder is weak and with plexing and stuff it snaps off. Other times it's not connected at all. Know your hardware, know your antenna because that is how you're going to capture the information. What I recommend to people is the connector has an NCX (ph.) connector heads on various websites, you can buy adapters and take the SMA adapter and screw it into the antenna directly. On this slide, lightening wants to be your friend. Don't be lightening's friend. The big thing to remember regarding the antenna system is make sure if you're going to make it permanent at your residence, pay attention to where lightening strikes are in your area, how frequent they are, the time of year they come around, otherwise that will happen to you. That is from the ethernet days transceiver that I managed. The radio survived and the rest of the ethernet system survived. The five foot cord between the radios of the lightening arrester was brittle and toast. I would rather replace a five foot cable rather than a 3 to $4,000 radio or have to repoll that again. So be cognizant about lightening. Static is another issue. Even on a nice, beautiful windy day there can be static that builds up and sends a charge back to the RTL or the radio. Rubbing it will generate static. I've seen these things with the connectors in them and the person moves the antenna and from D message you see it unplug and replug. A static charge was delivered into the USB device which delivers it into your computer which you don't want to have happen. Be careful regarding static. Additional reason to be careful with static is sometimes these things do not come with a static protection diode. Sometimes it's there and sometimes not. Crack it open, test and see. Few more bits of information that you need to be aware of. There is two manuals here and we also have them available on our websites or we link to them on the website. Is noise reduction. People turn on the RTLs and we're dealing with someone now that thinks he sees sporadic signals and either he is seeing clock sources out of the laptop or around him and it's frustrating. You need to go through this procedure of identifying signals in your area and doing your best to reduce them. Maybe a shielding, chokes, those two manuals have a lot of information for you in order to reduce your noise. One of the examples or two examples of noise that I have for you is based upon BFG barrier field and the ground. Can anyone identify what the problem is with the image on the left where the noise source is? Yes. Power cap. The reason why it's the power cap and both of these examples came from the second book. That connector had a plastic connector head. It's not adequately shielding RF signals coming across the ground into the computer itself. The device on the right, who has ever dealt with combining metals outside? There is generally a rule of you do not put metals of different types next to each other or for long period of times because they rust. Can anyone identify the rust on there? That was a huge signal source for that particular radio system. The last few bits of information that you need to know is about the clocks. All these SDR platforms have clocks in them. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad. The clocks in the RTLs are not that great. What you need to be aware of is as the RTL warms up, the clock is going to drift regarding the device. So that's going to create a frequency offset for you when looking at the radio sources. Go to the weather station transmission sites to see what their set of frequencies are. If you unify the clock sources on the RTLs you can observe more frequencies at the same time. However, don't do that because unless you're really curious because it gets expensive. And the last little bits on hardware mods. I mentioned earlier that as it warms up you're going to get some signal drift. I have some signal drifts in the area that can tell you what your signal drift is at. You can manage that by cooling the RTLs. One of the easiest ways to cool it and reduce noise is put it into a paint can full of oil. If you use vegetable oil make sure your pets don't get into it, otherwise you have two problems. But it helps. Little things to do to get extra mileage out of the equipment. I refer to TSEM on the sheet. When you come to the village to compete you need to know what the RF spectrum is looking like to find the signals of interest. You that slide there. Know your radio network neighborhood and you're good to go. The last but not least is the village. For the village, some of the workshops and presentations that are going to go on in the village over the next two days starting tomorrow at 10 o'clock is shown here. If any of these things like WPA enterprise, wireless penetration testing, renew radio, lots of SDR. Hack five is going to talk about their pineapple. A unicorn in the world of bluetooth is going to come up and talk to us as well. Regarding the challenges, we got all the Wi-Fies and all the SDRs, mobile SDR challenges and Wi-Fi challenges, fox and hound stuff but we also have a jduck hunt. We have a defined radio channel involving electric shock collars for a dog. If you're into pain that is also a thing. So Morse code, this is the Morse code signal for question mark. We have two minutes that we can take questions. In the meantime here is the schedule for all of the talks at the wireless village. The info booth is going to stream it and we're going to tweet the talks right before they start on our Twitter account. And before you ask the question, yes, we're going to post these slides over the wireless village.ninja website. Everything is there, go to the base site. These slides will be up by some time tonight and we'll take questions but we have like 2 minutes. Yes? No. No. >> There are no age restrictions in the village. >> Yes? The frequency slide for offset or the Sega? Thanks everyone. Have fun.