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TAPR DCC: Whither TAPR?

26 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by Venya in teknolojee

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

advocacy, amateur radio, digital communications conference, TAPR

I didn’t actually plan to stay for the TAPR board meeting after the last scheduled conference presentation on Saturday. My brain was still revving high in neutral while I tried to absorb some of what I had just been hearing.

So I was going over my notes and scribbling a few more thoughts when I realized that there was actually some sort of meeting happening around me.  Too late to escape now, so I kind of tuned out and played with my tablet; unlike work meetings, I actually had technological pacifiers with me this time.

I started to get interested in spite of myself. Continue reading →

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Nothing cool and technical tonight

25 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by Venya in meta, teknolojee

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

amateur radio, Bruce Perens, digital communications conference, TAPR

Sorry, no meaningful post last night or tonight.  Last night I worked/trained until 2100, and tonight I had to reconnect with my firstborn over Lego Star Wars II and then replace the LCD in my laptop.  (Pro tip: it’s much easier to just not step on it in the first place.)

I have more to say about TAPR DCC, a few of the cool presentations, and TAPR itself, but it will have to wait at least another day.  Hmm, actually, we’re seeing Porgy and Bess at the Seattle Symphony on Friday, so maybe I’ll front load some stuff for tomorrow.  I’m on leave for the next two weeks after Friday (minus drill weekend in the middle), so I should be able to finish up the last few things soon.

In the mean time, I strongly urge you to check out Bruce Perens’ comment on my last TAPR post, which aside from being technically more accurate and interesting than my post, is a disturbing reminder that Google works both ways and the Intarweb is not so big that you can’t find yourself if you happen to look.

OK, story time for kiddos.  Lately, it’s been Siglet Prime re-telling choice bits of Star Wars on his Magnadoodle.  This is remarkably entertaining for me and much better than re-reading Dr. Seuss.

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TAPR DCC: Digital voice, Yaesu, and Bruce Perens

23 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by Venya in craft, teknolojee

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

amateur radio, Bruce Perens, digital communications conference, digital voice, open source, TAPR, yaesu

So right toward the end of the first day of the conference, TAPR reps promised a special visitor and announcement.  I didn’t even have enough context to guess who that could have been.  Who would be prestigious enough, bright enough, nerdy  impressive enough to be considered special in this crowd?

Dennis, K7BV, as it turns out.  Or as he is known elsewhere, Dennis Motschenbacher, Executive VP for Yaesu North America.  That’s a fairly august personage, and the applause was (I thought) genuinely welcoming.  The announcement, alas, was not quite so well received.

I can’t even hope to explain the complexities of the situation, but it seemed to be raising Bruce Perens’ blood pressure a bit, so it’s worth a shot.

Continue reading →

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TAPR DCC: Select thoughts on SDR from NW Digital Radio

22 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by Venya in quote, teknolojee

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

amateur radio, digital communications conference, sdr, TAPR

Software-Defined Radio (SDR) is a very big deal.  This is one of the few areas about which I actually knew a little bit, as we were using some very expensive (complicated, confusing, poorly-interfaced, and worst of all, fragile) SDR equipment in Afghanistan in 2006.

The general idea for the layman (in which category I still and probably always will consider myself) is that because of awesome advances in technology over the last few decades, you no longer need purpose-built hardware to do very specific things in radio, but can build general purpose, flexible radio hardware and specify the parameters for your specific use in software, instead.

To use an analogy, playing video games used to require the purchase of arcade game cabinets.  And then game consoles.  And now you can play a video game on darned near anything.  The hardware (e.g. your PC, your phone, your tablet) is general purpose, and the specific application is all done in software.  (This is an apt analogy for another reason I’ll get to in a moment.)

Continue reading →

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TAPR DCC: Authenticating Amateur Radio Services on the Internet

21 Saturday Sep 2013

Posted by Venya in teknolojee

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

amateur radio, APRS, authentication, digital communications conference, TAPR

Heikki Hannikainen, a.k.a. OH7LZB a.k.a. Hessu, presented on Friday morning a talk about authenticating amateur radio services on the Internet.  He is best known for the aprs.fi site, which… OK, I gotta back up.  And I know I’m going to butcher some of this…

What the heck is APRS?

APRS stands for Automatic Packet Reporting System and has been in development since 1982 according to Teh Wiki.  APRS-equipped radios (or more conventional radios hooked up to computers running appropriate software) can report their position, send short messages, status updates, etc., over amateur radio frequencies.  The APRS-IS (Internet Service) takes this a step further by providing a system of gateways that make these updates available on the Internet.

aprs.fi takes this a step further by using the APRS-IS information and automagically plotting it using Google Maps to create a semi-real time map of status updates and movement and whatnot. Try it; you’ll see who near you has been running around with APRS-equipped radios (or apps, at least).

OK, I’m creeped out by this.

For those of us creeped out by the impending big brother state, this does take a little effort to wrap our brains around.  Why would you voluntarily share this kind of information?  But we’re making the mistake of thinking of it like text messaging where most of us (falsely) assume some semblance of privacy; the amateur radio paradigms are actually quite different.  All amateur radio is public; encryption is not allowed, and there’s nothing to stop anyone from tuning in.  Theoretically, even the digital modes are coded such that anyone could readily demodulate and understand it given knowledge of the spec.  (More on that to follow).

Keeping in mind historical and current uses of amateur radio, this sort of thing is a logical extension.  For emergency communications, you want to have a nice Google Maps interface showing where all of your emergency responders are.  If you’re hiking out in the hills, you want your significant other to know where to send the rescue helicopters.

So how does that take us to authentication?  OK, I have to back up again.

It’s sort of the anti-Internet.

Another piece of the public amateur radio paradigm is that there’s no anonymity.  You are who you are.  Call signs are assigned to your license by the FCC (in the States), and that information is freely available.  You can Google any U.S. call sign and immediately get an fcc.gov web page with their license level, name, and a valid mailing address.  (Note to self: get post office box.)

This, too, makes a dim kind of sense when you think about it.  Amateur radio operators are being licensed to use a public resource; no license, no transmit.  If they are misusing it, they need to be identified.  Anyone without a valid license for the activity they are doing needs to be found and stopped, but the only way to do that (lacking an all-powerful and heavily funded Radio Police) is for the community to do it themselves.  So the information has to be public.

When do we get to authentication?

OK, so here’s the problem.  aprs.fi and the like are awesome great services for looking up public information that should be public.  But what happens if you want to do something more interesting?  What if you want to send messages over a cool internet web page?  Only licensed hams can transmit, remember.  We have to have some way to authenticate people and prove that they are who they say they are before you can let them do cool things.

Hessu talked about several other sites and the approaches they took.  From a security and authentication standpoint, some were hilariously bad.  (Not naming names.)  He then talked about ARRL’s Logbook of the World, however, and that approach offers some real possibilities.

Logbook of the what?

Apparently, making contact with other people over the radio is A Thing.  There’s bragging rights involved or something.  But how do you prove that someone really made a low power contact with some random guy on the other side of the planet?  There’s a central registry (actually several, but let’s not cloud the issue) and you authenticate to the site, the Logbook of the World (LotW).  You put up your information for the contact: when, on what frequency, what mode, what you had for breakfast, etc.  The guy you talked to puts the same information up.  If you have identical information, that’s a confirmed contact and you both get credit.

(“But can’t you just e-mail somebody the information and have them fake it?”  Shhh.)

LotW authenticates using digital signature certificates.  I’m not even going to try to explain this one, but it’s the same way that web sites prove they are who they say they are, and the way that you digitally sign e-mail messages.  It not only authenticates you, but it provides for irrevocability; you can’t later claim that it wasn’t you that sent the message (used the cool service, etc.) because only you can digitally sign it.

The problem with digital certificates is that someone (an “army of volunteers” in Heikki’s parlance) still has to verify that each operator is who they say they are and issue the certificate.  What a pain.  And who has an army of volunteers?  And who would want to go through the process for each site they want to use?

Fortunately, Hessu points out, someone already has an army of volunteers and they’ve already been doing the work.  Why don’t we just accept the ARRL-issued certificates?

All of the computer security people are yelling at their screens right now because this was the obvious solution that no one thought of.

Or almost no one.  It turns out Echolink has been accepting LotW certs for a decade.  Hessu has set up a test site to demo the authorization method (authtest.aprs.fi) and demo’d it for us yesterday.  I don’t have a certificate from LotW, but I’m kind of inspired to get one now.

The next steps:

  1. Document
  2. Create more certificate authorities.
  3. Build awesome sites and services.

It occurred to me that a large (150+) meatspace meeting of amateur radio operators with an interest in digital comms was a massive missed opportunity to have a digital signature certificate-issuing party.

I really enjoyed the talk, and thought he explained the ideas behind the signature certificates in a way that most everyone could understand.  I hope the presentation makes it to the TAPR site.

[Edit: Link corrected.  Thanks to Tom Hayward!]

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TAPR DCC: Raspberry PI Apps in Digital Comms (W2FS)

21 Saturday Sep 2013

Posted by Venya in craft, teknolojee

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

amateur radio, digital communications conference, Raspberry Pi, TAPR, w2fs, xastir

John Hansen (W2FS) provided us with a great paper and a pretty entertaining presentation on a special version of his TNC-X he created for use with the Raspberry Pi, called (of course) TNC-Pi.

A Terminal Node Controller (TNC) is… Hell, I think of it as a computer interface to the radio to let you do digital things.  I’m sure there’s a more complicated explanation for it.  Actual standalone TNCs are relatively rare now, I gather, since much of the work can be done by any soundcard-equipped PC with a halfway decent processor.  But that assumes you want to cart around a PC, and even then, you have to set the volume levels carefully, since you’re doing actual real audio-to-digital conversion and back again.  A serial port (or, more commonly now, USB) TNC handles that stuff automatically.

Anyway, the TNC-Pi handles the cool interfacing between the Raspberry Pi and the radio.  The Pi can then run something exciting and useful, such as the Xastir (“ex”-astir, we learned) APRS client. (APRS is a real-time messaging and tracking protocol over amateur radio and, increasingly, the Internet.)  John walked us through the project and how he put it together for remarkably little money; I think it ended up running under $200 for the Pi, TNC-Pi, a small monitor, keyboard/trackpad, and accessories and widgets.  At some point I stopped taking notes, but hopefully his presentation will make its way to the TAPR DCC site.

I saw a lot of cool stuff that I didn’t really understand this weekend, but I could easily see the potential of this.  First, Raspberry Pi is inherently cool and I’d love to have an application for one.  Second, depending on the display (and his example was a 7″ screen for use as a car backup camera), I could probably fit this into my backpack HF kit as well or better than my netbook; certainly it would be easier to power for long periods of time.

The kit is $40 on his site.  I hope he sells a ton of them.  I wouldn’t mind picking one up myself, but my budget is still recovering from the unplanned FT-817ND purchase last month.  And will be for quite a while.

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TAPR DCC: I’m the wrong guy for this.

21 Saturday Sep 2013

Posted by Venya in teknolojee

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

amateur radio, digital communications conference, TAPR

There are things I’ve always wanted to do.  There are things I’ve never wanted to do.  And since discovering amateur radio three months ago, there are things that I never realized that I really want to do–someday.  Among the latter category is going to a really cool technical conference where very clever radio people talk nerdy to each other.

But the opportunity arrived today, not someday.  The 2013 Digital Communications Convention, sponsored by Tucson Amateur Packet Radio (TAPR) and the Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL), happened to be occurring in Seattle on 20-22 September this year.

I’m really the wrong guy to go to this.  I am that most uninteresting of amateur radio people: the no-code technician.  I don’t program.  I have only the shallowest grasp of electronics.  I’ve never built my own antenna.  I even own a $35 cheap Chinese import HT.

But I am interested.  And while I don’t claim to understand everything I heard, I did grok a fair bit.  I will try to summarize the more interesting and accessible bits.

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