Embedded - 76: Entropy Is for Wimps

Episode Date: November 12, 2014

Ron Sparks (@txNgineer, AG5RS) spoke with us about the convergence of makers and ham radio enthusiasts. The alternative internet: AMPRNet (wiki) aka 44 net South Texas Balloon Launch Team Pecan Pico AmSAT SatNOGS (their site, their hackaday entry,  and the video Elecia liked) Weak Signal Propagation Reporter Network ("whisper"). Also on wiki.

Welcome to Embedded, the show for people who love gadgets. I'm Alicia White. My co-host is Christopher White, and our guest is ham operator AG5RS, Ron Sparks. Hey, Ron. Thanks for being here. Hi. Thanks for having me. Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Sure. Let's see. I can give you the nerd version of myself in 30 seconds. You have to understand Tamarian. So, you know, that

what is it? Dharmakajalad Tanagra? I think you're referring to a Star Trek Next Generation episode. I am. You got your geek cred going. That's the story one, right? That's the one where they speak in stories. Yeah, I liked that.

They speak in stories and metaphors. So if you take that concept, you can say that my life was smart Forrest Gump and then coupled with October Sky but supportive parents and unsupportive peers. And then just soundtrack it all with Jimmy Buffett. So that's kind of me in a nutshell. A little more lucidly, though, I grew up in West Texas. And back in the time that I was a boy, everything kind of depended on where you could find information. So searching for information and obtaining information was really paramount in your life at that point if you were a nerd. And once you found these little nuggets and where you could get them, there was about half a dozen of us that would get together and share information. So it's kind of an interesting thing to have been raised in that era,

and then things progressed through, and then the Internet becomes what it is today, and Google is what it is. And all of the information that you had to scrounge for, the little nuggets that were in all of the ore and chaff, they're all right there for you now. So it's really more about finding things now than it was when I was growing up. So, yes, I'm kind of the old guy that, you know, I wrote my first program when I was 16.

I taught myself out of Daniel McCracken's Fortran 4 book. I lived in a little town, about 50,000 population at the time. So I went over to the local college and did sort of a whine and complain thing until the computer operator took pity on me and let me run my program, see if it worked, which it did, thankfully. And that kind of got me started down the software side. Previous to that, all my life, ever since I was a tiny child, I've been fascinated with anything that had electricity or light in it. And so as I grew on up, I started combining the two things and looking for I'll go out and have a career where I can use digital to control big power equipment and that didn't happen for

about ten years past that when the PC kind of came into it so so through a strange quirk of fate secretary in the electrical engineering department misfiled my card. I got drawn into the energy business and then had a career over the last many decades in different parts and components of the energy business. A fellow told me one time I was a company intrapreneur because whenever there was something nobody knew what to do with, oh, give it to Ron. He'll figure it out. And then I would take it, work with it, adapt it, adjust it until we got it leveled out and where it was manageable. And then they would take a traditional manager, put on it, move me to the next one. So I counted up the other day.

I am now in my 32nd office and my 12th boss, but I've only worked for four companies in my life. Wow. Wow. I've already beaten that by... I think I've worked in fewer offices, but other than that... So, because of that, I've traveled around the world a lot. I spent probably half of my career or more working international projects and have worked as a major professional manager, senior manager for, let's say, I guess for technical aspects. So I've managed

engineering groups, I've managed projects, I've managed operations and production, I've managed manufacturing a little bit and I hated it and didn't do very well at it, moved on quick and I've managed HSE safety management systems basically for, this is the second time in my career that I've done that. And so now in my current day job I am a kind of a two-headed person. One, I do safety management and data tracking and workers' compensation and all that stuff to fill in the gaps. And then I'm a company's special expert

whenever something complicated pops up and they need somebody to go out and look at it and figure out what went wrong. So that's kind of me in a nutshell. Big nut. And you mentioned, just before we started the show, you mentioned ageism. And I popped over to your LinkedIn and see that you graduated with your electrical engineering BS the year that I was born. So, therefore, you must be a little older than I am. Do you mind telling me how old you are? Or you could make it a range.

I don't care. No, no, I'm fine. You know, I can't turn the clock back. It's better than the alternative. Absolutely. And I've still got way too much to do to let anything like that stand in my way. My grandmother, when she was in her late 70s, looked in the mirror one day, and she came back in the bedroom, I mean the living room, out of the bedroom and said, I don't get it. I don't know who that wrinkled old lady is. I know I'm about 25, but that person in the mirror, I just don't understand. And I didn't know what she meant, but now I'm beginning to understand. Yeah, I already know what she meant. What it is, brain years and brain years and body years are kind of like dog years and people years.

They're different. And your brain years kind of depends on the individual. And they move at a slower pace than body years. But in body years, let's see, I've got to do the math, 62. So moving along. You actually don't qualify as old enough for our ageism show. No, I couldn't get... I'll have to wait until you do a reprise in three years.

Yeah. So, actually... You know, one of the things, when you talk about ageism it's especially subtle it's as a matter of fact so much so it's very hard to put your finger on it but I can give you kind of a an empirical data point when I was in my 40s i was averaging probably uh three to five headhunter calls a week then the day after i turned 50 that dropped to one a month and after i turned 55 it dropped off to every six months. And so, yeah, call it ageism or just whatever. It's kind of hard to believe that your skill set just disappears the day that you turn 50.

But as far as headhunters are concerned, that did happen. That's interesting. I mean, I think there's a lot of factors that go into their decision to set policies like that. It sounds like a policy the way you describe it, that, you know, things trail off at certain cutoff points. if it's an official policy, but I don't get it. Are they thinking that people are too expensive or that they won't work hard enough or won't be willing to do the crazy things that the 20-something straight out of college will do? And I think it's a mix of things.

And I think it's a mistake. I think it's a huge mistake because some of the best engineers I've ever worked with were over 55 when I worked with them. Well, I think it's all of the above. I've talked with a lot of hiring managers in my life and have been one a number of times and have other people that you do this gauntlet thing where you're the hiring manager, but there's five other people that have to interview your top three candidates, etc., etc. What I got in the way of feedback from a lot of them is, well, gee, if we spend a year

getting that person trained up, then they only stay with us and their career is over in another 10 years. And, you know, that's bull because, you know, the average length of turnover or service in America is way below 10 years now. Yeah. You're not going to get that 20-something to hang out for 10 years. That's exactly right. The other thing is they say, well, you know, their skills are out of date. And I think that that's a complete mistake. I think that, you know, especially in the technical professions, skills, you know, that's like me saying that calculus is out of date because Newton did it 300 years ago. It's not out of date. I just don't want to do it. That reminds me of job requisitions from the early 2000s

which would say things like, we were seeking a Java developer with 10 to 15 years of experience in Java. And I think there's a disconnect between understanding a technology versus somebody who works in technology. Exactly. If you don't have 10 years of experience of this thing that's only been around for two years,

it's not worth anything. You certainly can't learn. The other thing you see, or that I see a lot, is a misunderstanding of productivity. That just doesn't seem to factor into a lot of hiring managers' thoughts. It's not hours in the day.

It's not the number of hours you spend at work. That has nothing to do with productivity. Absolutely right. You're so correct. And, you know, I had a real compliment from my manager the other day. He said, you know, I could do some of this stuff myself. I hate giving it to you, but you're so much faster than I am. And said, you can do stuff in two hours that other people have to spend a day on. And, yeah, it's just because I know which way to go and what knob to turn and which button to push. Well, that's interesting because it goes back to what you were saying earlier about the early days

when you couldn't just go on the Internet and look up whatever you needed to find instantaneously. There were all those yellow books full of retailers where you had to search, you know, who makes the screw made out of titanium that I need? Right, or even from a software standpoint, well, how does this API work? Oh, I'll just go on, you know, Stack Exchange and see what somebody said. Stack Exchange. Or find the documentation. It's like, oh, great, now I have to go find a book or find somebody else

who's used this in the past find a research paper and so it blurs yeah but it blurs the distinction between people who have ready access to knowledge in their heads and know how to find things versus people who are just really good at google now and can kind of piece things together and i think the former is the higher, the more productive individual. You know, I think that that's true in many cases. Now, certainly I've met a lot of people in my age bracket that I'm sorry, I just wouldn't hire them. But not because of their age, it's just because they've become so narrow or so outdated or so inflexible that they can't adapt to today's projects and project world. Because you got to work global now. There's just no two ways about

it. And I can't tell you how many people I run into every day that can't figure out time zones. Oh, geez. I had somebody argue with me about which way we were going with daylight savings. Were we going forward or back, and did that mean we get an hour or lost an hour? And I'm like, really? We're going to have this conversation? Try writing the software to manage that. Yeah, but you shouldn't.

If you're over 15, you probably should start, like, remembering this. Yeah, but you have to wonder, is that because they don't understand the globe? I was talking with someone at the office the other day, and I said something about a globe and, you know, people using it in class. And she said, no, none of the schools have globes anymore. And I said, what? I said, how can you understand the planet, other countries, where they are? How can you even get a grasp on geography without having a three-dimensional globe to get it in your head? Yeah, and a Google Earth on an iPad isn isn't quite the same no and and the paper

map you can't spin it around and say someday i want to go here as it just stops on your finger and then you have to end up in the south pacific where there's nothing yeah yeah you know but um and then that goes back into another uh kind of strange thing is that I think I've discovered that there's some people that probably maybe two-thirds of the people I meet are two-dimensional thinkers, that they just can't grasp a three-dimensional object in their brain. And so then the other third, they look at it and they go, oh, yeah, that makes sense. and i sort of found that out accidentally i did part of my career was as a reservoir engineer and i would look at these contour maps of various reservoirs and it just popped out in my brain what the shape was it's a mountain a hole hole, a ridge, whatever. And I came to the realization that everybody couldn't do that.

And so if you can't do that, you've got to have that three-dimensional object you can touch if you're going to learn how geography works. So I'm going to switch subjects and try to get back to when we started talking about doing the show. You proposed something, you proposed calling it open source hard science driven by embedded systems. So with that as the topic, I know you do a lot with ham radio and that has to do with open source. So where were you headed when we started talking about doing the show? What I saw was a, there's convergence happening, in my opinion, of the maker movement, the open source movement, and ham radio. And it seems kind of a natural progression of things for that to happen.

And I'm just really excited because I think that there's an opportunity for the people that accept that and use it to take technology and open source to just places we haven't even imagined yet. But it's happening. And when you think about it, it makes sense. The microcontrollers that I learned on back in the TRS-80 days or actually even a little before that, the things that I learned were programmable interrupt controllers, PICs. They have now become the sophisticated mini computers that can do just about anything. So at that level of hardware, there are a lot of people in my age bracket, and I can explain the reason for the hams all being roughly in that age

bracket, but that understands the hardware piece of microcontrollers. So it begins to come naturally back to them, and they say, oh, I can use this in my radio, I can use this in my project, I can use this in my balloon, my research, my whatever it is. So they're being pulled together with the software and embedded people over the hardware pieces that they knew. And on the flip side of it, your makers are looking, they start off and they build this thing and then they build that thing and before long they think, gee, I wish I didn't have

to run a wire over there to control that thing and before long they think gee I wish I didn't have to run a wire over there to control that thing so I need to do it wirelessly and over a brief period of time they begin to start looking at wireless and as they go wireless they need more range and then they start thinking about antennas and the next thing you know they're coming together into the space through the wireless side of things, the RF side of things. And they're finding commonality with some of the hams that have done those sort of things, invented them and do them every day for their day job. So I think there's a natural progression happening as those two arenas begin to converge. Now, the downside, the worst case situation, I see an awful lot, and that's reinventing the wheel. There's a lot of reasons for that.

I didn't invent it is one of them. The other one is, oh, no, I can redo it and do it better. Sometimes there's some use to that. Deconstructing what exists and see what makes it tick and what you can do better. But a lot of times it's just I haven't bothered to learn what's out there and so I'm reinventing the wheel out of ignorance and not out of motivation. So I'm curious, this is bringing back some memories.

I used to do some packet radio a few years ago. A few? Back before the internet. And, you know, it was really exciting to send data instead of saying, oh, who's out there on this repeater today and going back and forth or whatever. I think that was fun too, especially when you got far. But there was something really cool about, okay, how far can I get with bouncing, going from one repeater to the next with my stupid little,

I think they were called terminal node controllers back then. And just seeing what you could do that way. And I think it was IP over a radio. It is. Yeah. And, you know, it would get progressively slower the more hops you had. It was pretty abysmal, but it was really cool. What do you think has changed since those days?

Because I've been out of the ham radio world for a long time. I'm curious what you're talking about is convergence. What do you think that looks like now? I can tell you exactly what it looks like. It's called the 44 net, and it is an IP group that starts 44 dot and then the remaining IP addresses all belong to ham operators. And it has become a parallel internet.

You can go to ampr.org, I believe it is. And it's a complete internet connection and it's structured exactly the same way the packet radio network was structured, except instead of using the lower frequencies for packet radios, now many of these things are in the 3 gigahertz and up range, and they're using off-the-shelf Wi-Fi type equipment, but ham radio type antennas. Most of Germany and a lot of the surrounding European countries are completely blanketed now.

Anywhere you are, if you're a ham, you can hook into the 44 net and have a completely redundant internet connection. That's fascinating. Did they get a class A address? Yeah. They got a whole class A. They have a whole class A. Yeah, the Wikipedia article on it's pretty good as I'm trying to catch up.

I assume there's a highly placed ham at IANA or something. But you know. I don't know exactly where. I know that the U.S. person that sort of coordinates everything for the U.S. is in Seattle. It turns out the Texas coordinating person is a fellow that I know here in Texas that was in early days on packet radio and so when I approached him to get an allocation for Houston I just got all tickled because I found out oh it's Walter and so we started talking I sent him some sketches about how I thought the Houston metro area needs to be wirelessly connected with 44 net and he he sent back a note and said, oh, I looked at your sketch.

It's exactly what we did in the old days of packet radio. And yes, that's going to work great. So now that's kind of one of my four big projects. I have to limit myself, I've discovered. And so that's going to be the one that I try and focus on, or one of them, for the next year or two, and see what we can do in setting up broadband 44-net backbone. You know, I'm not that shocked that they got a bunch of addresses. It's such a large space, because there is a huge volunteerism in ham radio, and they're often

the emergency services when all hell breaks loose. It's the last band of civilization is the ham radio band. That's the story, anyway. Well, it's been true. It has been, yeah. I can give you lots of examples

during the Columbia shuttle crash. Right, I remember reading about that. Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Rita, Hurricane Ike. We got first-hand experience on all of that. That's one reason I belong to the amateur radio emergency service in this county is so that you wouldn't think about it, but about two years ago or three years ago, we had a 700-year record drought. And we got bad forest fires around Texas.

And, I mean, people would have five hours to get out of their house. They were, it was coming. So ham radio helped with that because the cell phone networks would jam up and lock immediately. The towers are not made for that kind of crammed communication. And so that's just one aspect. Do you have any worry that dwindling interest in ham radio is going to lead to the loss of that kind of safety net? I think that's where the makers come in. I think if the makers and the ham radio operators can really find enough common ground,

they'll be drawn. Oh, you need to turn some of those makers into ham radio operators. Oh, yeah. You have to have licenses. I guess that goes back to your question. Not so much anymore. You know, first off, getting a license is dead easy now. It really is.

It was pretty easy not too long ago. Yeah, when we got ours. Yeah, there's no Morse code requirement anymore. What you find is that there's more Morse code operators now than before it was required because people get on the bands and all of a sudden they come to find out that the narrowest bandwidth, most effective communications method you can have, if you look at Shannon's noise equations, it's Morse code.

And with all the apps available to learn Morse code, it isn't as hard as it was when I tried to study it. Right. Now I kind of do it. Yeah, I always felt like kind of a fraud because I got a technician, no Morse license. I always felt a little guilty. God, I got a technician divorce license. I always felt a little guilty. God, really?

Yeah, that's how I started. And the reason I got into it, you know, when I was a boy, we couldn't afford for me to go get the test because back then you had to drive from West Texas to Fort Worth and take the test there. And that would have required hotels and dad taking off work. And, you know, I just wasn't going to happen. So I just satisfied myself with low power stuff for many years and then ran into a bunch of guys here in Houston that were doing television. And, oh, that's kind of cool. And then one thing led to another, and I ended up getting my license in the 90s so that I could do amateur television. And that's when I started realizing

that, gosh, amateur radio is all of the technology you can imagine that people do in the daytime. They apply it to their hobby when they get a chance. They were the first makers. They were the garage engineers. And I've always respected their just build it ethic. Yeah. They make a big fuss about how the makers are making things. And I'm like, yeah, the radios were kind of there before.

Heathkit existed a long time before the Maker Faire. Exactly. there before you. Heathkit existed a long time before the Maker Faire. And whatever else. And, you know, I kind of take some pride in the fact that that's exactly the way this group, I caution anybody that's listening to this, though, there's kind of two types of ham radio guys, clubs, whatever you want to call it out there. And it is usually guys. Sadly. Yeah, that's the other issue.

Well, you know, it's funny. When you find young people or ladies that are in the hobby, it's like they're treated like royalty most of the time. It's quite different than I've seen in other groups. Everybody remembers your call sign. Absolutely. They love to hear the voice. With your voice, Alicia, if you were to get on a DX pileup,

you'd get answered first. You've got a great voice. Thank you. But it's, you know, it's the, there's these two different groups. One group are really interested in their radios and operating contests and making connections and contacts and kind of what I call the old guard. And they're very cliquish. And one of the guys over in the South Gulf Division is a psychiatrist. And he developed a survey and a test and ran a scientific analysis of the entire South Gulf region. And in doing so, he found that these clubs,

some of them, they're just very inward. They're very cliquish. And then other groups, they're all about the hobby, the technology, the building. I want to see it work. Yeah, bring it for show and tell. And what you have to do if you are new to the hobby is you have to sniff around and the traditional wisdom is go find a club to go on to i don't i don't know i i kind of doubt that works

well i think what you have to do is go online start looking around at at the things on google that interest you and look for the ham radio call sign. And if there is one, drop the guy an email. Because there's all of these different very technical societies and groups and what have you. They meet virtually. Most of the time it's by a list server. I know that you and I had an email exchange about satnogs. And I joined that group and sure enough, email server. I know that you and I had an email exchange about SatNogs and I joined that group and sure enough, email server. So it

tends to be that way and now that you've got connectivity, geography doesn't limit you. And of course, ham radio has always been unbounded by geography. Well, at night anyway. Well, in the daytime. It just depends on where and how. I've had some great long-distance contacts in the daytime. It's just got to be right. You just have to wait for a solar flare.

There's also a hard science aspect to this. You do something with balloons? Yeah, there's a group of us that, gosh, they've been around longer than I knew they were. The group's called the South Texas Balloon Launch Team, and it's a total anti-club club. We have no officers, no organization, and no structure. But we annually launch one large edge of space weather balloon. And then during the year, we do smaller ones, and it's all kind of financially limited. Whatever money we can scrape together together we'll do a launch and we've developed one of the club members has developed this what they call them the pecan is it it's the pecan pico and it's

roughly the size of two postage stamps and it contains everything that Chris was just describing from his TNC to radio to everything. It's all driven by an AVR. Thomas has got this strange fetish with making things small and it just keeps getting smaller and smaller. He's hand-sorting 0402s. Better him than me. With a microscope? They have pecan roasting parties and we all go together and about half of us sit around and have a beverage and say, boy, I wish my hands were that steady. That'd be me. And they sit under, sit with microscopes and build the pecans and then

cook them so that they reflow. But this little pecan, what it does, it has a GPS on it. It has a two meter transmitter on it, two meter being 144 megahertz. And then it has an APRS automatic packet reporting system which takes the GPS data off of a GPS module, converts it into a ham radio packet, and then transmits it down on the 144 megahertz signal. It goes out on a standard bell 202 format. Then stations on the ground pick it up, hook it into a node that is called APRS.FI. And you can see real-time track data as to where things are and what it's doing and where it is. And not to be one to leave things alone, Thomas changed the programming the other day to where it looks at where it is geographically. And it changes its output frequency and format based on where things are. I know he, I guess about mid-summer,

we figured out that the ISS was coming over in packet mode at some point. So he had the balloon automatically switch to the frequencies of the space station, send a packet up to the space station, and bounce it back down. And that all happens on something that's smaller than the two AA batteries that power it.

I think that's something that people don't know about this hobby is some of the incredible stuff you can do like that, like talking to the International Space Station. And it's beyond just making a little gadget that sits on your desk.

It's taking electronics to interact with things thousands of miles away or hundreds of miles in the case of the ISS, depending on if it's right over there. Exactly, or taking, you know, one of my favorite things is taking plain old commercial stuff and repurposing it. So back, I guess, it's been about three or four years ago, we were able to get the first Wi-Fi connection from the edge of space. So what we did is we took

a, one of the WRT54GL, the Linux box routers, and fixed that up and put it into a mesh mode where we could stay connected with it, modified the antenna to better fit the balloon, and then I built a small ground station that would do azel, azimuth elevation tracking, kind of the way that Sat nogs is doing and had a another 54g on the back of the dish along with a broadband amplifier and away you go and so we were able to get Wi-Fi connection I was able to keep a link to about 23 miles, I guess, and most of that was up, so it was about six miles downrange in whatever the geometry works out for 23 miles path. We also found out that you needed a good solid, and I guess it's okay to talk about dB here. We could see into the unit at about minus 90 dB,

which was the manufacturer's spec. But if we wanted any kind of connectivity to the balloon, it took about a minus 70. We had to get pre-hot signal. And even then, it was a little iffy on some of the web pages. I had built a little web server based off the OLIMEX mini web I think. And in order to send it the commands and have it switch a switch and toggle a button on the package, I really had to be about a minus 60 dB. And that is really hard to do when you're constrained on the antenna on the balloon side.

Right. Yeah, I was just going to say the antenna is probably the hardest thing to do to come up with a configuration that fits. Yeah, but your web server, the thing that's serving your web pages is in space. Right, yeah. That's so cool. That's what I'm saying.

I'm just, you know, I'm just like, I got lost around the edge of space and just started daydreaming. No, I was... But, you know, it's... So, something you touched has been to the edge of space. And that is one of the things that ham gets you a little more than some of the other. It depends on our definition of edge of space.

Yeah. It's a wide edge. You're as high as you can go financially. Yes. Now, if you do want real space, there's another piece of ham radio called AMSAT, which is Amateur Radio Satellite Corporation. And we put together satellites and launch them and have been doing for many years. One of them that's still up there operating, believe it or not, is AO7. And AO7 was built in the 70s. And it still works.

You send a signal up to it, it repeats it, sends it back down. And we can talk over it. You know, nothing seriously complicated. My call sign from space. I'm starting to get excited about this again. Well, that's the danger. Might have to go shopping.

And studying. There's so much what I tell people now is ham radio is it's not a thing. It's anything. If you want tech, it's there. Somebody out there is doing it.

If you really want a lesson in humility, I went to this digital communications conference that's put on by one of the amateur radio groups. These guys were talking about the software-defined radio stuff, and man, some of the technology is just stunning. But their day job is building software-defined radios for the military. So they take anything that's unclassified yesterday and it's at the front of the project list.

And so, amazing technology. So, there was a, I'm going to go into the Hackaday price, because I know you and I talked about SatNOGS, and I'm done judging, so even though they haven't been announced, this isn't going to count as any influencing. But you had comments, at least on SatNOGS, and I bet you have some on that SDR that was part of the projects. Sure. I've got an opinion on everything. The SatNOGS project looks fantastic, and it's something that I really hope moves forward, and I hope that I can help contribute to it.

It's also something that we've been doing for and working on here in Houston for several years now, not the Internet connectivity side so much as the auto-tracking and getting the antennas to automatically position and use them for either balloon tracking or satellite tracking. So I know some of the strengths and pitfalls of what they're going to try and, you know, what they're doing and what they're going to run into. For example, and this is what we were talking about, I hope people don't reinvent the wheel. One of the little things that never crossed my mind when I was trying to build the Wi-Fi to the edge of space and had that digital connection and what have you, I didn't have time to change my video transmitter. So I left the camera arrangement and everything as a standard 1.255 gigahertz downlink

with analog television. So I guess for probably 15 years we've been flying TV cameras so that all the balloons always have live TV for us. In doing that, what I found was that on my steerable dish that I had built, which I was using for the digital side, I also had mounted a standard analog antenna for the TV side, and I found that the analog was absolutely imperative for getting the digital aimed properly. Oh, right. The digital is either there or it's not, and I didn't have any kind of system that would tap into the front end of the signal chain and try and tell me how much or where the signal was. But because I had the analog transmitter on the same package, it was really easy. You just peaked on the analog signal.

So that way I could be sure I was locked in. If you try and do auto-tracking with a digital signal only, you run into some pretty serious complications quick because you have to have some way to tap off that front-end signal and know how strong it is. Yes, but they are also doing the networking side. I mean, I loved that they were doing all these things and they documented it so well

that I felt like I could build it myself even though I didn't have all the experience. But they are adding the web components so that you can track a satellite through multiple areas. Absolutely. Well, you hit on the $64 million word, documentation. Their documentation is brilliant. I was so impressed with that. You know, as far as web linking so that you can track things around the world, go have a peek at WhisperNet or Whisper, W-S-P-R, weak signal radio propagation. And you can look at

signals all around the world real time. There's a number of different SDR websites that are linked together so that you can see. So if I broadcast here in Houston, I can see how strong my signal is in Europe, what it looks like when it gets there, because it's real-time and interlinked. So, you know, I can, and that's been going on, oh gosh, since 2007 is when I found it, but they don't document well, and, you know, the weak signal guys, they're just absolutely off the hook, in my opinion. They get upset if you use more than one milliwatt. I mean, literally, they write flame emails to you if you're at one milliwatt.

They want you to be in the microwatt range. And they transmit this super slow Morse code, and their signal deviation is, what is it? It's like 10 hertz. And the key in any radio is you try and get the deviation down low so that your noise level goes down. What band are they on at those power levels? That's not above noise. 70 meters? No, yeah, they're 10.524100 or something like that.

It's stunning. If you're sitting at a computer, do a quick Google on WSPR and look for, they call them grabbers, G-R-A-B-B-E-R. And you'll see these signals, and they're sitting there ticking along with 5 or 10 hertz deviation doing this slow speed morse. It's fascinating because this is a part of amateur radio that I think exists in other hobbies to a certain extent, but it's the attempt to do things on the edge.

Break the laws of physics? Minimally. Yes. Information theory. Or try to use the medium of the ionosphere, you know, in the most efficient manner. Or I only have, you know, a microwatt. How far can I get? And it's very fascinating to me that it's almost like a...

You know, there's a contest nature built into the hobby that we're going to try to do this with what we've got. Entropy is for wimps. Well, you know, I mean, if you can't read a signal below the noise level, you're just not. You know, because you can stack these things and, you know, it's just. Well, it's sort of the, I was thinking about some other hobbies like I do, or used to do as another labs hobby, amateur astrophotography and stuff. And there was a little bit of that element, but mostly it was what super expensive high-tech gear can I get that will guide my telescope or what camera can i get you know it was it was a to get the best images you really needed to spend money and and right learn a huge amount about image processing yeah there wasn't a little group of guys at least i'm not aware of it a little group of guys and gals sitting around going well we only have you know this $10 Sears telescope from the 70s

and a pinhole camera. What can we do with that? Exactly. And that's what some of these folks are doing. And it just lights me up. I love it. That's the part. No, it's great.

I just get all ecstatic over it. No, we don't want to, you know, everybody that does this stuff is generally smart enough to know that the laws of physics ruins your fun but you you can dig right to the edge um one time i was wondering um everybody had told me six meters is real flaky. It's here, it's there, it's gone. Nobody really understands six meter propagation. So I said, okay, well, I want to see how low can PSK31 go. It's a 31 hertz deviation digital mode. So I hooked up my PSK31 transmitter, threw a wire over the tree in the front yard, and started talking on a second channel to a guy over in San Antonio, which is 175 miles away. And we started working to see if we

could, even when the band was closed, if we could push a signal through below the noise. And we got what's called a one-way QSO. In other words, he was never able to completely read me, but I could read him. And when you think about the amount of, you know, that was through no propagation. I mean, it was just, the band was closed, the noise was up in the middle ranges, and yet I was still able to fish a signal out of it. You just got to bounce stuff off the moon.

Yeah, there's a bunch that do that. I met a guy when I was living in Dubai, one of the fellows over there, a great fellow, that's what he likes to do. He does moonbounce. And so he's talked to most of the people in the world that have moon bounce rigs. And he just, that's his thing. He's been involved in was a funny, funny story if you listen to his history. But, you know, there's people all over the world. Oh, yeah, I want to do this. Okay, I do too.

Let's try it. And so, and to me, that's what makers do. Exactly, I was thinking. Circling back around. That's what makers do, but they do it for art and for technology is in service to other things for the makers. Some makers. I don't know. Not always. I guess Maker Faire has become an art contest.

And somebody like me that finds the art in the technology. To me, a beautiful circuit layout or a really slick system, that's just pretty. And yeah, I'm a little different, but You're not the only one. I hope not. That's something that the internet has been able to teach me, is that I'm not the only one out there. And if there's any anything that I hope people take away from whatever I say is you're not the only one.

If you're interested, there's somebody else there. And you just got to find them. Yeah, they may not be right next to you. Right. And they may be really pitiful at documenting stuff. You know, because that's the big fallout. You know, that's the, of all the failings in ham radio, it's, yeah, I got this to work. I did this.

I wrote a little quick note. I stuck it on the internet and it's in some obscure web page that you may or may not be able to get to. Not even the robots will find. Yeah. And, you know, it's, guys, that was great stuff. Why didn't you, why didn't you document it? And it's just time. Most of the time they, they don't have time to, they're doing their day job, they're doing their hobby, and they don't see any value to taking time to document. But it's there. It's just a matter of finding it it that's one of the areas that the makers have

done really really well on is the sharing of knowledge because part of their ethos ethos thank you i was going to go for political platform and that didn't work at all but their ethos is education and sharing and so i mean some of that's got to be from like Make Magazine that's helped drive or at least support the movement. And the idea that, yeah, I built a jet engine in my garage. Do you want to? Yeah, here, let me show you how, has been very much a part of them. And for ham radio, there's been the sharing of knowledge, but you have to find the right person. It isn't as well distributed.

Exactly. It always, I mean, this is probably out-of-date information, but it always seemed to be face-to-face sharing, going to club meetings and stuff was the way that worked. I think it used to be, and it depends. If you're still into buying a $5,000 rig and putting up $10,000 worth of antennas and doing contesting. Yeah, okay.

You can probably find that in your nearby local club. But if you really want to dig into the technology of wireless, the technology of digital, of SDR, of what's the difference between an infinite impulse filter and a finite impulse filter? That's where you have to get, you're probably not going to be as lucky as I've been to find the six or seven people in a population of nine million that do that. And I don't know, I wonder if makers have the same problem. Because I talked to Charlie that runs the makershed here in Houston, and he seems to talk about having trouble making connections with other like-minded people. So, is that something that holds the whole thing back?

Yes. I mean, I know a lot of people get frustrated with the introverted engineer stereotype. That's only because it's true. That's only because it's true. I know how to tell an extroverted engineer. I'm sorry? He looks at your shoes when he talks. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. When you take that to its next step, I've sort of mentally developed what I call the life cycle of a ham.

They start off as a kid. They get interested in electronics. Somewhere along the way, they think, gee, if my toy would just talk without wires. Then they get into radio. They get maybe into ham radio, and about that point, they hit puberty. And then everything goes dormant until you have life and family and kids and all of that stuff kind of gets resolved. And at the point that they begin to have a little more time and a little more disposable income because maybe their career is more advanced and leveled out a little bit and the kids are out of college, they come back to ham radio.

And that's why even though you see that many ham radio operators are older people, why it never seems to die. It doesn't go away you know because logically if it was only old people in ham radio and you didn't replenish that then the hobby would disappear but it hasn't it's grown and it's not necessarily growing with young people it's growing because the folks are coming out of this cycle and they're interested in technology or they had technology jobs or they begin to move that way. At the end of the hand-life cycle, if they're a really introverted engineer, they turn into curmudgeons. And there's nothing wrong with that.

You have to accept that and say, okay, he's going to be grumpy, but he's still going to answer my questions, and he's still going to help me. And it's nothing personal against me if he's grumpy. And if it is personal against me, I'll walk away and go somewhere else. But I find that most of them, they may have these, a lot of guys that have personality quirks. And gosh, I've met a number of them at open source conferences. They're still wonderful people and you can learn a lot from them. You just ignore the quirk.

And it's just sort of like ignoring a tick or whatever that you just get by it. You've all gotten used to me saying so whenever I want to change the subject. I'm sure other people can get it. Do you really? That's good to know. The noise gate sometimes does. So, what do you do in your day job? Me? Yes. I know what he does in his day job. Right now, I'm in the middle of a global deployment of a new software system for tracking health, safety, and environment issues. And we'll have that completed on the 20th of November.

So, it's the end of a two-year thing, and I can say, yay, it's done. The other piece, I handle all the various claims and losses where people, you know, if they say they got hurt on the job, you have to look at it and say, okay, what was it? The company I work for has about 8,000 000 employees so there's a fair number of those i guess we've got it down to where i think we've only got 68 open 60 open cases out of 8 000 people so we're doing really good on our safety performance and then if something happens like somebody has a really bad accident or car wreck or whatever, and we need to figure out if there's something that needs I discovered over my life is I think it's like a musician. There are some musicians that are soloists and some that are accompanists and they have

totally different styles and personalities and you really can't make a good soloist into an accompanist and you can't make a good accompanist into a soloist many times. I think it's the same way with engineers. You've got designers, and you've got troubleshooters. And there's a lot of people that are really good at sitting down and putting things together and figuring out how to solve a problem and getting it working, and then there's people that know how to troubleshoot if it's not working right.

And I kind of fell into that second camp because growing up, my very first job was, I had two jobs to make my way into college. One of them was raising hogs and the other one was doing TV repair. And so the TV repair job taught me troubleshooting skills. And right now, you give me a piece of software, and if it

can be broken or something can be put in wrong, I can do it the first minute. I don't know how. I know some other people like that. Hey, I resemble that remark. It's just amazing. The know some other people like that. Hey, I resemble that remark. Yeah, it's just amazing. The microphone doesn't burst into flames.

Just give me a piece of software and tell me what it's supposed to do, and I'll test it. And there's something about the way I attack. I go backwards on it or something, and I'll find a bug straight out of the box. Push the button too many times, or I don't push it for long enough or whatever. And it just breaks. It's like my middle name should be Murphy. No, I think it's a field of some kind. Yes, because sometimes you make me get away from your computer.

I just haven't caught up to what's going on. Certain people have certain... Exactly. So, in my day job, I do a lot of figure out what went wrong and try and make sure it never happens again. And, you know, because when you have a bad thing happen on a project, an incident, you know, whether somebody's hurt or you lost money or you lost a property or whatever, I look at it that you've got three things that the engineer needs to do. One of them, you need to protect the individual. So if there's something that needs to be done to immediately protect that individual that's involved in whatever it is, you do it. The second

thing you do after that is you protect everybody else in the organization. You don't want a, I think NASA calls it a genetic defect. You don't want a defect that exists in the design or in the process or in the system somewhere that could cause a repeat. And then the third thing you do is you help the lawyers understand how to protect the company because that's their job. And lawyers and technology don't link up naturally, so you have to be a bridge or a liaison between them. I think it's interesting you've found the safety aspects as a good place to use your ability to destroy things wisely. I've told

people that when I work on FDA products, everything breaks for me, and I like that because then I can be just a little more comfortable that it won't break as much for the people it's supposed to be helping. It's fine if it breaks on my desk. It's great if it breaks on my desk. That's the best place. That's where you want it to break. You don't want to break it with the customer. You want it to fail on your desk. But I have some friends who it always works for them. I mean, it's like they have the opposite field that it doesn't really matter how close it is. It always squeaks by in their presence. And I'm happy that I'm not that way.

That one race condition on your little hardware circuit down there that you've missed is it doesn't work for you or me and it does work for them. Chris, you had another question? Yeah, well

it's a personal question, sort of personal in that it's i'm asking for myself um i was wondering what advice you would give to someone who had kind of lapsed from amateur radio and wanted to get back into it possibly the person who got out of it and then had family and now has a little bit of disposable income sure Where would the first place to go be? First place to go is to sit down with a nice cup of coffee in a pretty environment

and think about what you want. What fascinates you? What are you passionate about? What kinds of things are really interesting? Are you really interested in signals and noise? Are you really interested in doing the most with the least? Are you interested in, hey, how can I can, you know, how can I MacGyver something to where I can communicate no matter what? Kind of figure out what you

want and then start with a few of the main ham radio organizations like a double rl.org or amsat.org and are if you're interested in in digital i would say capper.org t-a-p-r And just kind of start looking at what's out there and then find you a mailing list or two and join that and sort of sniff around. And once you kind of get a feel for which branch or how, you know, what things interest you, then it's pretty easy to begin to locate people in that piece of the community.

And if you can find one of the conferences that is going on that is in an area you like, or if you're not sure whether you like it or not, you just go to the conference and see what's there and see if you like it. I don't know. There's a huge community in California. I guess you guys are in California? Yeah. Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley.

Yeah, I don't remember off the top of my head. You could go by Ham Radio Outlet and just hang out. The community in California is just a mess. I would say stay away from that just because it's so crowded and complicated. But there's a lot of people that work in Silicon Valley that do stuff. And then I'm kind of an inveterate magazine reader. So I would say the – well, I just don't know which branch you're fascinated you're fascinated oh i think i think that's good advice is to figure out what you want to do with it and and then go from there and then i i don't

know the answer to that question so i think i think that's very apt i think that's good advice all over that's good advice for all large hobbies why are you why are you pursuing this? Even for the way I figure out. Well, yeah. Yeah, for your career, too. But a really good way to get to that level of introspection without having to do some kind of metaphysical thought process is, what problem have I got around the house or in my life that I think it would be really cool if I could solve differently. And kind of look at that because that's where I got, oh gosh, that's where tons of my projects come from. Gee, I'd like to be able to monitor that, the current on my air conditioner remotely. Okay, well, so the electric amp is pretty good and and I need to get a sensor, and then how do I do this? Look at what you'd like to build, and then from that, you can start saying, well, I'd like to build

that, but boy, if it could communicate a little further, or gee, I'd like something so that when I'm sitting in my easy chair and relaxing, I can see what happens when I make a signal here and does it go around the world? You know what I mean? Figure that out. Then you, then the world's your oyster. Cool. I think that's great advice, but I'm out of questions. And Ron, do you have any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with?

Oh, no, I can't think, I can't think of just one. I'm out of questions and Ron do you have any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Oh no I can't think I can't think of just one so I really appreciate the opportunity it's been great and if you know I really want to sincerely thank you and Chris for the time and effort you put in on the podcast. It's a great listen. I have a three-hour commute every day,

and it's great to have good podcasts. And I really appreciate the audio quality. I hate the ones that are terrible. Thank you. Thank you very much, both for listening and for chatting with us. Thanks, Ron. Anytime. Thanks thanks my guest has been ron sparks that's ag5rs and so much more you can reach ron on twitter or g plus i'll have links

in the show notes also thank you to christopher white for producing and co-hosting and not messing up the audio like i usually do and thank you all all for listening. If you'd like to say hello, email us, show at embedded.fm, or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. Our final thought for this week comes from Steve Wozniak. My first transistor radio was the heart of my gadget love today. It fit in my hand and brought me a world of music 24-7.