Travis Goodspeed & Fabienne Haas - The Great Radio Heist

how's everybody doing today do you have any fans of trains here I'm Travis Goodspeed this is Fabian he uh Fabian hos we have been collaborating on some crazy projects for 15 years now um we once got kicked out of our own show at Paradiso in Amsterdam we were kicked out by Prince who never showed up he had his people thr us out for him um by announcing a surprise show that never happened true story we've been playing around with a lot of Technologies um we began by collaborating on knitting machines we're both ham radio operators and also play around with radios together um and have been uh inadvertent roommates over the years I I might have

overstayed a couple of visas on her couch maybe allegedly allegedly overstayed our first project together is not the subject of this lecture but it's pretty cool so we're going to mention that first the real subject of this lecture is a radio Heist that we performed in which um we wanted to record a music show we wanted like a soundboard recording but we also didn't want to go to all the hassle of like going to the show um so we did it wirelessly from across town cool our um our initial project our first collaboration was called multi-threaded Bano dinosaur knitting Adventure 2D extreme it's very googleable the idea was that we would knit a a history into a tapestry like the

biotapestry that celebrates the um Battle of Hastings the problem is this doesn't have any Adventures or any dinosaurs in it so we figured we'd combine this with a video game and a kiosk where you could draw your own Sprite in order to play that game we sourced a uh knitting machine in the north of Holland and the lady was still knitting on it when we went and picked it up we worried that we were going to take this poor old woman's like very last knitting machine that we were taking away her last Hobby and that she'd have nothing to do for the remainder of her years and then we get there and she has nine machines set up

all in various stages of projects her husband is wearing two sweaters he was wearing three and it was one of those towns in North Holland where like the house itself doesn't have a mailbox they have like a collection for all the ones on the street and so we had to just knock on random doors and ask where the crazy lady with the knitting machine was which is surprisingly easy to get across despite the language boundary knitting machine in Dutch by the way is Bri Mach which I don't speak Dutch I just speak German and French so the word that matters so the first thing that we did was we reverse engineered all of this machine we we took it apart we figured

out how the different buttons connected so that we could write a keyboard emulator we helpfully we we found a disc emulator that was intended for the Radio Shack trash 80 and happened to be compatible with this machine so we were able to have a USB port on a computer pretending to be the floppy dis drive and the keyboard of the machine and that allowed us to load in new patterns by uh janky python 2 script because it was hacked but it was not automated and we needed that so we add a little extra Hardware on there um and then we made a cool knitting machine project where we had uh our Avatar that we created and then we built a video

game with dinosaurs and banjos go go banjo dinosaur go go banjo dinosaur he's fast he's blue grassp he's a banjo dinosaur uh we were also very sleep deprived for a week of working on this in Amsterdam and came up with crazy songs and stuff the end of this was presented in mediatic Bon which is an art museum uh if you jump ahead one slide these are some uh patrons of the museum playing the game and as they play the game um we have these four RFID sensors and they have to move their Dutch metro card between the four sensors in in order to move the character you know up down left or right but they have to share the sensors and

the sensors will not allow both players to move in the same direction at the same time and this allows you to tell so much about the people playing the game because on a first date or or Newly Weds you know the fellow might say to the lady uh excuse me Madam but might use cease moving moving left such that I might move left is that would be amable to my strategy within this endeavor and but married couples would just jump all over each other and like slam the players back and forth so I wasn't able to capture it on film but just a minute after this the the gentleman pushed the lady's hand out of

the way and she dumped that beer on his head so the permanent winners panel was knit on a hack knitting machine and was went all the way up to the ceiling and back down um showing who won uh with their Avatar with the the day that they won the video game cool and in in the ethos of uh somebody who likes to understand everything and just goes along for the ride I'm going to talk about Betty caner Jackson she was uh a Hangers On A groupy a member of practically The Grateful Dead and she met them by stumbling into a house party in hate Ashbury and then started um going around and recording everything that they did even though they didn't

really know that she was recording High Fidelity recordings of everything that they did uh from 71 to 76 and she finally got on the payroll in 77 so there's all these really really um beautiful recordings of Greatful Dead concerts any dead heads here oh hard tough Crown this became like a tradition that began to apply to other bands so here we have the internet archives collection of Grateful Dead shows from 19 1965 until '95 in some of these years there are more than a thousand unique recordings from their live performances so tapers were allowed at the Grateful Dead to stand behind the mixing board sometimes even patch right into the mixing board at the Grateful

Dead and then later take those real toore because they took a nagra or whatever realtoreal recorder they had to the show and then took it home and then they started these tape trees where they would ship people cassette tape recordings of the concerts and this is continued for other bands like um I'm a big fan of uh the silver mountains I Mora Orchestra and TR La band with the silvermount Zion choir and revery or whatever the hell their name is this year and a lot of their shows are available from these live recordings from an album where the laptop was stolen and they gave up on the album and never finished it so there not everybody was as um

forgiving as the Grateful Dead to tapers and not everybody had a tapers section at their live show um one of the people who did not was Frank Zappa snitch he uh went to the FBI to try to find tapers who were releasing his material early before his Studio albums came out um and what do you call going to the FBI when you're mad at someone snitching especially if it's nonviolent like they were just recording his shows they weren't committing acts of Terror or things that you might legitimately want the authorities to step in for um so we wanted to do the same thing in the modern world and we started joking about how this might be done and

how we might use technology to help um for one thing you can make very small recorders these days for another thing um the realtoreal tapes kind of stretch a little so if you want a stereo recording from multiple locations in the venue um you're not able to line them up if it's real toore because they'll drift and then you have to continuously recorrect it um with digital you no longer have that problem um with GPS you could um align the two receivers and then we realized we were overthinking it and we didn't have to make any new hardware for this we could just buy some and get the project over with so sdrs come in a bunch of flavors

SDR stands for software defined radio which I'm sure many of you have played with already um there's expensive ones and there's cheap ones and uh a software defined radio uh allows you to tune into a frequency that it allow that it supports so the the expensive one here is from Edis research this is about a $1,400 model um this is a very nice software to finded radio it lets you do things like receive and transmit at the same time it has an fpga in it so you can do the processing within the radio instead of having to do the process ing externally in your laptop um there are some um disadvantages to this as well

though like because it's rather expensive you might not want to just leave it sitting on the bar as you walk away the cheaper model the real Tech SDR these are dirt cheap I think when these first came out I had a stack of nine of them walking out of zetan in Berlin and they were only like €35 a piece and the prices have gone down since then they began as television receivers with um like an SDR mode just so that they could receive FM without having to implement that in Hardware hello train and the train comes back um whichever of these you use you don't need to understand the fancy math behind them you don't need to write

custom software for them there are excellent programs available in the form of SDR Plus+ and SDR sharp um if you're on Windows Windows the only good things you have are debuggers and SDR sharp so take advantage of that and use the better SDR software you need you need antennas um but those are easy to come by and then you need the software and then the final thing that you need is like um it really helps to prototype this stuff away from a real concert because a real concert is a fixed amount of time and you have other things to do like listen to the music so we bought one what we bought was not the equipment

that runs the speakers we bought an inar monitor inar monitors um used to be only for very very um fancy concerts so like big stadium shows with Selen Deon and or as we say in French SEL um and uh they were they were the sort of things where you she would have the Wireless in your monitors but your local Bandit your local V you wouldn't have Wireless in your monitors but now they're so cheap that they're prevalent everywhere um so this this would be used for one musician in the band to hear the rest of the band playing in order to match timing with them so each each member of the band has maybe a different

mix that they're listening to so the lead singer maybe has more of the drummer and the bass and then the basist has mostly the drummer and it's basically on the preference of each band member what they want in each in their mix of their inear monitor so once we have the hardware we can test it out we can set up our um software defined receiver we can set up our transmitter we can tune Our receiver to the frequency that is helpfully shown on the uh transmitter but in a real show you can't do that because in a real show you don't necessarily have the right to look at the um at the frequency on the box

without the bouncers grabbing you throwing you off the stage and beating you up the um the way around this is that you can look at the FCC regulations um the these devices initially began on the 700 MHz band in 2010 that got taken away and that equip that equipment still exists and those frequencies still work they're now just dedicated to other things so if you use these frequencies for one show you will probably get away with it if you use them repeatedly some snitch ass like Frank Zappa snitch will rat you out to the FCC and then on account of that snitching they'll show up and they'll tell you to please stop using that frequency because it's needed for other

things um so the result of this is that other frequencies got taken over 2.4 5.8 and 900 MHz are good targets for this because they're rather unregulated um FBS and I both have licenses for using 900 MHz for amateur radio 73s to K7 FP but it's sort of understood that you're going to have a lot of interference there and the sound monitor that we purchased runs in that band because for regulatory reasons nobody cares other frequencies that are handy include um what used to be used for UHF television um I'm sure that half of you are too young to remember this but there used to be television channels with numbers and they used to refer to the

frequency that it would be broadcast through the air without cables or the internet or streaming and and very rudimentary antennas that look like a joke yeah you'd actually have antennas on top of the TV and you'd have to send your unloved siblings to go and adjust them during the the show and you'd yell at them whenever the signal got worse and you'd pretend that them standing in like a crazy way would make the signal better when it didn't um in any case some some of these are are um attainable outside of a venue and some of them are really local to The Venue because they don't have a lot of reach right so these old

TV channels 470 to 512 MHz they're pretty good for range 900 MHz will um get through brick work a little bit better than that 2.4 GHz will not um it's also interfer intered with by Wi-Fi so if they're using 2.4 GHz we don't get a good audio signal because um as we're receiving local Wi-Fi around us will interfere with it and it will microwaves happily top stomp over that channel those science ovens goddamn science oven is stealing our vitamins one way to tell what frequency you have is to snap a picture of the transmitter in sorry the receiver instead of the transmitter so this particular model the as 950r is running at 470 MHz if you can see it and then look it

up on your phone you then know what frequency it'll be um you can also look up uh other brands so like this one is 2.4 gig and that would be rather bad for our purposes but going back to these frequency bands um you only need to check these frequencies and when you're receiving a signal the length of your antenna and how well it matches to the transmitter is a lot less important than when you're transmitting which means that you can hop around and you can check all of these ranges until you find one that has the show you want to listen to and then you've got the show you've got a laptop you've got a

cheap SDR you've got a cheap antenna and you know what frequencies to look for um so I told Travis in 2023 I said there's this concert I really want to go to there's this B and I really love it's called colony house and he said pardon me what I figured we should go but there are there were some problems with those like um you know his show is kind of loud it's kind of crowded we hadn't caught up for a while you know you want to have a good conversation sometimes and you also want to hear the music and at this venue they sometimes have chairs outside and you can use the chairs in order to sit

and have a conversation outside of the show but then you still kind of miss the show so we figured we'd do better and the location of this show um might be familiar to you if you look in this Photograph you might sort of see like some brick work and some windows um this was at a venue called The Mill and mine and um we we you know we we looked this up on uh satellite photography doing all the James Bond and uh just behind the Millan mine is this bar called the Public House very neighborly very neighborly bar and the stage of the mill and mine that we are standing on right now the colony house was standing on uh

back in September that happens to be just across that alley from the patio at the public house where we can sit outside and enjoy the nice weather and uh do some radio beautiful spot yeah yes so we gathered all of our gear um we needed two laptops for this because there are multiple signals and even if there is a best one you want to be able to check out the second best one while recording the show from the better feed um we Mount we brought antennas that we mounted on the fence that is it has a very nice metal fence which makes a very nice ground plane for an antenna worked out great so we Mount the antenna

up um run the cables to the laptops begin hunting around and eventually we found the right frequencies and this is the shot of me finding the right frequency you can see the by the look on my face I'm about to have a very good rock show experience um the other great thing about this was that you know we were we just in like a half empty beer bar so we had some nice beer we didn't have to wait in line for drinks um this is my obligatory reminder that you should all tip your bartenders it does not matter that you're using drink tickets in fact if you're using drink tickets do you tip more or less than you normally would

more more great all right so this was the signal that we caught it came in at U 47195 MHz one of the complications of the realtech SDR is that its oscillator is not very reliable which means that having two laptops and two receivers we could never quite agree on which frequency the signal was on like um you know one laptop would always show a little higher than the other and that made it difficult for us to agree on which channel was which it involved a lot of like swapping headphones back and forth and looking at relative distances like is this above or below the other signal and we were wearing headphones so we weren't bothering the other bar

patrons as well um I just want to say be polite it would have been really fun to take over the Bluetooth though um this is the first recording so um we started this before the show actually began and um before a show begins there's like a warm-up period and you need to uh make sure that all of your sound is in order and so the first thing that came through is [Applause] this something something happening sorry no I'm just tun in okay I could hear like clicking it sounded like you're like punching through pedals that was a

song so looks like four bars on this microphone you want me go and change no it's fine it's cool it'll last like four four five shows on uh here comes great and then it good so this is the band talking back and forth to the live audio engineer at the show and we recorded that from sitting at the bar behind that brick wall over there you folks can't see it from where you're sitting but Andrew our lovely technical director is glaring at me right now we we did not tell him about these Shenanigans ahead of time so thank you for letting us do the grand reveal um yeah so before before things begin you wind up hearing like a lot of the

audience noise in the background with a bit of the sound checks overlaid on it and then pretty soon you begin to hear in more than

that I could baby we're doing all right Knoxville this is Knoxville we're calling the house from Nashville it's good to be back y'all L and [Music] the um so the uh this screenshot here you know is of one of the wave recordings that we made we took this from two of the sound monitor feeds for the entirety of the show um you can see at the very beginning I had a little trouble with uh figuring out the right levels to record it but um the vast majority of this is almost studio quality and the only limitations on that are the quality of the radio the quality of the antenna and the quality of the signal um so long as you have uh a good

receiver and a good line of sight to the transmitter even if uh a thin little brick wall is in the way you can capture everything that you need in order to hear the entire show uh without physically entering the venue and you can get um and record it for yourself yeah for later now um it's at this point that I need to offer a little bit of legal advice even though I'm not an attorney I suggest that you do not do this for that snitch ass um Frank Zappa's concerts I would also like to note that I have a lovely employer but this has nothing to with what I do with my employer and they do not condone this

Behavior Frank Zappa's Behavior no obviously none of us condone that oh he is oh not recently I hope oh thank God okay um so at this point um we are going to make a sacrifice to the demo gods in honor of our friend Felix lner um still live don't worry hi FX FX uh if you're out there we wish you well and we will see you again soon thank you for the ls friend I do wish that he drank taste of your drinks all right um so let's see how this works I'm gonna here we go

think good thoughts for the demo y'all Al

righty okay so as you open up the software um sdrsharp SDR Plus+ um a couple of competing tools you're given um a band display and as you start powering it up you begin seeing the actual signal um it's saying that this is the 33 cm amateur band and that is true um but of course we all know that it's illegal to transmit music in amateur radio uh so we are making this transmission as uh unlicensed operators and if there are any Frank zappas in the room don't bother snitching about this because the FCC doesn't care um my receiver happens to be very close to the transmitter so I'm seeing multiple aliases of the original signal when you're at a

distance you won't see this when you're at a distance you'll see pretty much just the original transmission and none of these aliases the important pieces to find are you need to choose the right frequency so I can slide this around I can pick either the original signal or one of the aliases I'm going to go with this Alias here because it looks particularly clean and then the other thing you need is to choose how wide this would be so if it's too narrow because this is an FM signal the volume will be maxed out and everything will sound really clipped and ugly on the other hand if the um on the other hand the reason you want

wide deviation is that the wider the signal is the more quality there is for music We need a lot more quality than we would need for a ham radio communication if I were to take my handheld radio like this and I'm having a conversation I can have that across town or across East Tennessee but I'm not going to do it with as much width as this signal as that would be wasteful and then the only remaining thing to do is to um tap into our transmitter and to see what kind of music we have

[Music] sing along everybody this is live y'all we're live Rick Rolling you through an SDR picked up that we're transmitting you're welcome thank K ah the demo gods they smiled upon us today all righty this is the transmitter that we were using if you want to pick one of these up for yourself it's like um you know 150 on Amazon for a base model do keep in mind that the cheaper ones like we purchased will be at different frequencies than the ones that professionals use um in our case our own unit was running around 98 MHz the one that was used in the concert was around 471 MHz um

the if you were to extend this if you wanted to do like [Music] um other sorts of shows or a wider variety of them um you could imagine setting up like a a permanent base camp near a venue like um you know set up a recording box that would run at the the public house every evening collect all of the shows unfortunately it it's not quite that simple in that a lot of the touring acts bring their own equipment and the diversity of that equipment means that you're gambling on whether or not you will receive a particular show um we happen to catch the Colony House show because it was the it because it used the right um equipment and they

had the sound monitors and our radio could handle those frequencies and the frequencies would go through the wall if they had used wire wired monitors we would not have caught anything because the wired monitors don't transmit their signal more than a you know an inch by nearfield so they're not going to go across the street similarly if they used 2.4 gahz the um the Wi-Fi in the bar that we were at and maybe the microwave oven in their kitchen although I sincerely hope their kitchen is better than that would um create interference with our signal and we wouldn't have gotten any quality in our recording um we'd found that um we've not seen many of these monitors using

digital uh which would complicate reception but is not a problem for this sort of work because Digital radio while it provides interference robustness and it provides more efficient bandwidth usage and all of these great benefits it's really bad for latency um if you remember how landline telephones had less latency than your cell phone does it's the same reason the little section of audio needs to be compressed before it can be transmitted in digital radio and that sort of a delay can break the timing of the band so that they're not able to keep up with one another and um it it becomes the musical equivalent of when you're in a bad teleconference and you start hearing an echo of your own

voice delayed by just a little bit and you want to throw the computer against the ball give up zoom and become a farmer um this is not the opinion of my employer um yeah so you can see here we're live um live transmitting from the um from the transmitter it would normally go to an inear monitor receiver but Travis is picking it up with an SDR you can unplug it he's picking it up with an SDR that's plugged into his laptop with a tiny antenna um this is also good as a beginner project like we've not written any code here we've not written any new software uh all that it required was taking some um cheap gear and a couple

of laptops out to a bar and having a good evening of conversation and music so yeah now you can have high fidelity recordings of all your favorite bands as they come through town and you get to sit in a nice uh table in the bar behind the venue cool uh conclusions or

questions uh so to wrap up what have we learned here today that it does not say RSVP on the Constitution thank you Sher um any questions yep uh we got a question in the front row uh if you I'll pass you the mic are you aware of um any features trying to prevent what you were able to do in any of this gear or is it obscure enough that nobody's even bothering currently most of it is unencrypted and un it's completely in the clear um historically there were scrambling methods that would protect an analog signal against casual interception um they seem to have largely been forgotten about because the digital methods of protecting a signal

are so much more effective and then here the digital techniques aren't relevant because we're not dealing with the digital signal so it's this weird mix where like we're using an analog technology and previously we knew how to defend that analog technology against interception but we've lost that knowledge because it hasn't been relevant since cable TV became digital in the 90s and um yeah just another caveat it is legal to listen it's not necessarily legal to transmit so long as it is not a cordless telephone call within the boundaries of the United States so don't um don't send noise over your uh favorite bands in ear monitors please oh right so there's one other piece to this which

is um when you have um these monitors and when the soundboard operator is doing a sound check with the band and they're going back and forth and talking to each other um it being Wireless there is nothing other than the capture effect that prevents you from jumping in on that so if uh your celebrity crush were on the stage and you wanted to say oh my God your show's so awesome I just or hopefully something more meaningful um you could do that by transmitting over the original signal so as long as you did it with uh roughly the same deviation and more power as viewed from the receiver so across the street would be rather hard in that we would need a

lot of power but if you were in the venue and you had a handheld radio modified to do wide band instead of narrow you could just sort of key up and transmit and say oh my God I think your uh show is so awesome thank you so much and the band would then say who the hell is this and why the hell am I talking to you instead of where's my audio engineer yeah so I want to give a shout out to all the audio Engineers of the world and uh especially a thanks to Andrew for not cutting us off in the middle of this lecture thanks for letting us continue uh when we told you that we pired your

Venue thank you thanks everybody we hope you had a good day and we'll see you around