Can You Hear Me Now? A Survey of Communications Platforms During Emergencies

Welcome to Besides Las Vegas's I am the cavalry track. This talk is can you hear me now? A survey of communications platforms during emergencies given by Slava. Few announcements before we begin. Uh sponsors. We would like to thank our sponsors especially our diamond sponsors Adobe and Iikido and our gold sponsors Drop Zone AI and profit. It is their support along with our other sponsors, donors, and volunteers that make this event possible. These talks are being streamed live and as a courtesy to our speakers and the audience, we ask that you check to make sure that your cell phones are set to silent. On that topic, because these talks are being streamed and recorded, if you have a question, we

do ask that you ask the question into the microphone. If you have a question, raise your hand. I will come by with the microphone if we have time. I have no further information. So with that, let us get started. Please welcome Slava. [applause] Thank you. Thank you. Uh so if you've been in this room at all earlier today, you you might have heard some scary things. I heard some scary things. But uh what I'm going to talk about is how do you as an individual communicate in a state of emergency? We talked a lot about how organizations can fix themselves, how they can work uh in incident situations, but how can you as an individual talk to your family that's

maybe like 10, 50, 100 miles away? Um maybe the roads are blocked. Maybe that actually happens a lot where I live in Seattle. Uh we have a lot of fallen trees. [laughter] It's pretty rough sometimes. Um so let's dive right in. Right. I'm Slava. I go by Party Horse, sometimes Slobber. That's my uh ham radio handle KK6 if you care about that kind of thing. I've been a ham radio operator for about nine years. Uh I am a general class at this point. We'll talk a little bit about amateur radio classes uh once we get there. I've been working on Mtstic and Laura for just about a year. I am party horse on there as well. If that still works, I

might have run out of battery. Outside of that, uh I've been an SR manager for the last four years. I've been working in SRE, DevOps, and cloud for the last 10. So, this conference is kind of like a side thing. Infosc isn't directly what I do, but it's fun. Um, I've owned a lot of Orange Cats, too. That's a lot. There they are. Robert Pollson is a big one. Leslie Clarret is another one. If you know both of those names, kudos to you. If not, that's totally fine. Thank you. Why are you guys here? You guys are here to get one question answered. And hopefully this will help you a little bit. In a state of local

emergency, how do you communicate across distances, control remote devices, and onboard others? It's great if you are an amateur radio operator. It doesn't mean that you can talk to somebody who is not. It's great if you have a meshtastic device and you know how to use it if your friends don't. So, ideally, you would learn this and spread the knowledge and get your friends on boarded before the state of a disaster. specifically in the US. I uh I've lived in the US for the last 19 years. I only really know radio communications in in the US. So, this is kind of limited to that. Canada might be similar. I don't know. We'll see. What is radio? What I'm going to talk

about is specifically how FCC defines different radio services. And there are a lot of them. We're going to talk about four. I think I might have lost count. But what is radio in the way that we're going to talk about it today? It's a frequency range combined with a specific modulation. You might have heard about AM, FM. Those are modulations. It's how the signal gets transmitted. And the frequency is obviously the frequency. CB is the first one that we're going to dive into. I'm going to try to run through the boring ones to get to Meshtastic and then we'll talk about that a little bit more. But CB is the one that like, you know, truckers use in

movies. They don't apparently use it as much anymore today, but I found this really cool picture of this dude driving a truck. [laughter] Citizens Broadband Radio Service is actually what it stands for. You don't need a license for it. You just buy a radio. The power limits are relatively low, but actually kind of high when we get to talking about some other ones. Um, there are 40 channels, which is kind of a senseless metric to talk about. Um, we'll kind of talk about that later. Um the distance is up to 20 miles, but like it's again kind of kind of weird to talk about because uh some of the frequencies are specifically designed for well not

designed but they work as a line of sight distance. If the radio can effectively see the other radio, it can transmit and receive depending on how powerful the u wattage is on the transceiver, right? Um depends on the antenna too. The antenna is a very important piece of this. Um, so in the mountainous range, you're probably not going to get 20 miles out of CB. Um, but CB is also not line of sight specifically. It actually works on on frequencies that have atmospheric propagation, so it can actually bounce off of the atmosphere and go pretty damn far. Um, sometimes it literally depends on like the cycle of the sun. Kind of magic. It's super easy to get into. If you get

like a $20 radio or like a $100 radio, you stuff that in your truck and it works. Um, it's pretty cheap. You're probably not going to be spending more than like a hundred bucks on it. FRS. Uh, these little toy radios usually use FRS. They're also unlicensed. Um, it stands for family radio service. The power limits are much lower. That's why they're in red. Uh, it has 22 channels, which whatever. um much lower distance definitely line of sight because they actually use I think VHF. Does anybody know here by chance? >> No. Okay, cool. >> I think it's VHF. >> I think it's VHF. Yeah, CB actually uses HF. High frequency versus very high frequency. And then guess what? There's

also a ultra high frequency. a great separation of uh frequencies, but super cheap, super easy, but like not very effective. GMRS, you probably saw these bow fangs somewhere. They actually uh GMRS actually partially uses the same frequencies as FRS. Um you do actually need a license for it. It's 35 bucks, but there's no exam. You literally go to FCC, you give them your address, and you're done. you just say like I'm not going to do best stuff. Totally fine. Power limits are a little bit higher. They depend on the frequency. So some frequencies will actually not allow you to use more than half a watt. Some of them will actually use them 50 watts apparently. It's crazy. 50 watts is a

lot. Um a lot more channels to play with. A lot more distance because you have more power, but still line of sight. Difficulty is medium just because you have to pay 35 bucks to FCC and give them your address. Uh maybe get a PO box or something so that it's not totally publicly available. Uh you know my call sign, you know my name, so you can like look up my address which is super funny. Uh you can also download the entire uh uls database by FCC and then like grap it and parse it and whatever fun ham radio is amateur radio. Ham is actually not an acronym. Uh it it's supposed to stand for like hamfisted

amateur radio operators that don't know what they're doing. Apparently, this term came in like the 40s or 50s or 30s. I don't even know. But it's just amateur radio service. That's all it is. Uh the license uh is you pay 50 bucks. I think like 15 of it goes to the examiner and like the rest of it goes to FCC. The 35 it's the same 35 to FCC. There are three levels. So, usually you start with a technician level, you move on to the general level, and then you go to the extra level. Um I'm on the general level. I failed the extra exam and I'm not really going to do it again because who cares? I get I get enough to play

with as it is that I'm not really doing enough with but technician is super easy. Yeah. What's up? >> Oh, perfect. Yeah, >> that's awesome. Yeah, so Devcon is actually offering technician exams >> apparently. Thank you. Um and uh like I think I passed it with like two hours of studying. So the level of effort isn't very high. You literally actually if you come to me afterward after after this there's an exam guide that's uh really fast to go through. You literally just go through like 20 pages of PDF you read it and you will probably pass. >> And the question pool is so memorize all the questions. >> Yeah. Yeah. The question pool is static.

So if you have decent memory you'll be fine. Um the power limits are high but it's kind of depends. In fact, like all of the answers to all of these questions used to be depends and then I decided I'm going to mark them green or red. Um, you can do a lot with amateur radio. That's the entire point of it. Uh, you can broadcast on a lot of different frequencies on a lot of different bands. Uh, you can do that atmospheric propagation magic thing that I was just talking about on some of the bands. Um, and you you will be paying more for better radios, for outputting more power, for better antennas. You will climb on your roof and

hopefully you're not afraid of heights. I'm very afraid of heights and that was not a fun experience. Um, so yeah, actually, oh yeah, so this is a great picture. Uh, this is a radio that's like somewhere in the thousand range. It's a KX2. It's very well known for what it is. It's a portable radio that operates on HF frequencies. I don't remember the wattage that it outputs, but like you you literally can use wires as antennas. You just throw them on a tree or on a mountain or something. And then you can do that atmospheric propagation thing and talk to people in like Russia, I don't know. So, um, and another point I want to make

here, it says right there, the amateur radio spectrum of like knowledge isn't very complicated. It's complex. There's a lot of information. There are a lot of people you have to talk to. Most of them are old and grumpy. Sorry, opinion. Uh but there aren't a lot of youths uh participating in amateur radio because like it's sometimes hard to you know build that connection, build that communication pattern. Um but a lot of people love talking about it and a lot of people love working with it. So I would encourage everyone to play with amateur radio. Um really quickly I'm also going to mention Ares since this is I'm the cavalry. ARAES is a amateur radio emergency service. So you can actually

volunteer uh for these folks who work with um emergency services to provide communications for uh disaster uh events right? It's volunteer run. They provide emergency communication. That's basically all you need to know. Unless you're working with them, in which case hopefully you know more than that. I don't work with them, but I hear it's super fun. So, as you become a technician, that first step, that first level of the license for amateur radio, you're going to be able to operate on all of those frequencies, except for the gray ones, not the gray ones. Um, but like the green ones, you can, the red ones, you can, even the like squiggly over there, you can. That's actually Morse code. As

you get to the general class, a lot of these actually open up and you'll be able to communicate on those. uh as you get to extra a lot more of them open up. The reason I actually put this here and none of this is to scale. I tried to kind of make it scale but it doesn't really work. Uh the reason I put this here is to compare to where the other services I was talking about fall into there. You'll see that CB falls somewhere in the HF range and that's why the atmospheric propagation magic I keep talking to. Um you see that F FRS and GMRS are up there in UHF range as it

turns out. Um you will also notice that both FRS and GMRS and CB I guess all three of them they actually fall outside of the ranges that you can operate on as an amateur radio operator. Um at least for tech t tech t tech t tech t tech t tech t tech t tech t tech t tech t techition level. I'm pretty sure that's the case for general and extra as well. Laura ironically actually falls right into the band plan of the technician level license. So you can operate Laura a meshtastic as a licensed individual. Um or you can work it as an unlicensed individual and we'll talk about the differences there. It's actually better to not be licensed when

you operate Laura. I'll talk about it talk about why in a second. It's actually all about encryption. So CB is defined by FCC part 95. F FRS also part 95 which like none of this really matters. It's just like the rules that piece of rules is what defines these uh radio services. GMRS is also part 95. Ham radio has its own amateur radio service part 97. None of these allow encryption. Uh and Laura also doesn't allow encryption. Well Flora does. FCC part 97 does not. So if you choose to play with meshtastic and put in your uh your call sign, you will effectively get two things. You will get a higher wattage output if your device

can actually handle it because as an amateur radio operator, you can you you have a different watt limit, different power limit on those frequencies. However, you also won't be able to use encryption just because it's disallowed by FCC. Part 15 is the I think ISM the industrial sciences and medical devices part of FCC rule set. Uh it actually does allow encryption. So, if you choose not to put in your call sign, like if I literally just don't put in KK6R into the Meshtastic app into where it says call sign, then encryption will be enabled and I'll be limited to one watt, which is not a lot. But Laura is actually specifically designed for its frequency range to be the long range

radio transmission service. I I don't really know how to say. Um, Laura is actually a digital protocol is what it is. Like I said, doesn't require a license, has a very low power limit if you're using it on part 15. Um 12 channels, which like don't worry about it. [laughter] You can read about it more later or we can talk about it more over a beer. Um the distance is yeah it's 10 miles and it is line of sight only but like if you stand on the top of a mountain like some people have you can achieve like 300 kilometers of uh communication distance effectively. Um and again a lot of this depends on the antenna. If you don't

have a lot of power output you can uh you can use specific antennas to get them to do what you want. So, if you know that No, back in the day when we were all stealing Wi-Fi, we were using those like what are they called? Sprinkle Springle cans. >> Pringle cans. >> Yeah, Pringle cans. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. Exactly. And what those are are effectively directional antennas. So, you point them at the thing far away, a couple miles away, and you will get excellent signal, right? Um, you can do the same thing on all of these radio services if you know where where you're going, right? Yep. >> Repeaters. Yes. Uh, repeaters are oof.

Um, I started reading about this, but I don't actually remember. So, you can use repeaters on the ham amateur radio service as a licensed individual. Um, they're all over the place. You probably live next to one. You can probably hit a repeater and then you will be able to talk to all of these random people that are also licensed. Um, CB used to have repeaters. As far as I know, there are very few at this point. Um, FRS and GMRS don't really use repeaters. And part of the problem is when you use a repeater, repeater is basically another station. You talk to the repeater, it rebroadcasts your signal so you can talk to more people further because it has

more of this power output, a better antenna, things like that. But when you use a repeater, you transmit on one frequency, you receive in another. FRS, GMRS, they don't really support this. Uh, generally CB doesn't really support this. Amateur radio specifically, most of the devices will support it. Thank you. Repeaters are a great uh thing to talk about. Um but let's get back to Laura. So, uh the difficulty of entry is low. The cost is low. Uh I put a picture of that little device over there because it's probably the most popular. It's a Heltech V3. It costs like $23. You get a battery. You shove it on there and then you can connect to

to it via Bluetooth off your phone and control it with a Meshastic app. I'll also talk about the difference between Laura and Mstastic in the next slide. Um, and then you can talk to random people specifically this conference. I think my device is connected to like 160 people right now for some reason. Um, and uh, at some point everything will fall over once enough people are connected. So, what is Mishtastic? Mostic runs on top of Laura. And I think I actually have my slides kind of rearranged here in not the best way, but I'll get to the other thing later. Mstastic runs on top of Laura. Uh it uses Laura as a communication platform. Uh but mestastic is a decentralized

encrypted mesh enabled communication. I don't have a noun in there. I'm sorry. Communication platform. Let's go with communication platform. I think that's really good. It's decentralized because it doesn't connect to a specific server just like the rest of these uh radio services. You connect peer-to-peer, right? It's encrypted. Mishtastic supporting supports encryption. It doesn't mean that maybe you should trust it with like critical infrastructure. So, be careful about that. It's an open source project. Everything falls over all the time. I think it was actually previously broken already. So, just think about that. Um, it's mesh enabled, which means that you can talk to uh another device and that device can transmit your message to another device

and that that message can be transmitted to another device. Again, that means that uh what do you have a one mile range, a three mile range that you're extending it effectively three-fold because by default you can do three hops with meshtastic and that's what they recommend. This is the slide I was kind of talking about before. Uh within the frequency range of 902 to 9.8 MHz, Laura works. That's exactly what's what is defined for is a long range digital protocol. On top of that, meshtastic was built. Um and this is what I was talking about in terms of the mesh networking. Uh with every hop you decrease the hop count and you retransmit. Uh this gets insanely

more complicated with uh different roles of meshtastic clients. There's a client role. There's a client mute role that like doesn't retransmit and only receives or something. There's a router role. There's so much information here, but I only have 20 minutes. I'm actually getting to the end of that. And this is just a highle talk. But if uh the entire point of this talk is to get you guys interested, to get you guys researching this, playing with this, the cost of entry is super low for meastic. Again, I hugely recommend it. There's also this crazy thing. You can connect your phone to, you know, your meshtastic mode node and if your phone is connected to the internet, you can get it

connected to MQTT and then send all of the messages to MQTT and then other nodes will pull it from MQTT and resend it. So you're gonna be talking to like people super far away and that's effectively a repeater. Uh for example, this is Seattle and all the nodes that one just one MQTT server has you can connect to different ones. What can you do with mestastic? Obviously messaging. I've been talking a lot about messaging, but because it's an ESP32 device. Well, some of them are. The Heltech V3 is a Heltech uh I'm sorry, ESP32 device. It's got GPIO pins. You can control other things with it. You can also send metrics across. Telemetry is what I'm talking about. Uh

you can send things like specifically within the meshtastic application. Right now, what's actually supported is a GPS position. You can send over power information. You can send over weather information, like you can literally just have a weather node sitting at your house and like broadcast what's going on at your house. Um, a light intensity, distance to an object with like the ultrasonic uh sensors or whatever, particle concentration for air quality like ppm, radiation if you have that. Um, body stats are also supported. You can also control remote hardware with those GPIO pins. And that's a little bit more complicated, but uh if you set the two devices to like your own channel and your own encryption key, only you

can talk and you can send those messages still peer-to-peer and through the mesh. Uh but nobody will be able to decrypt them except like the encryption key people that are within that channel. So you can control your own remote devices. If you want to play with meastic, where do you start? You buy one or two of these. You should buy two of them. You flash me mashtastic onto them. The instructions are super simple, but like some of the terminology is kind of hard. You can set a custom channel and encryption key or you can just join what's called like Longfast, which is the most popular channel uh and like talk to all the people that are around

you maybe and then experiment. Uh if you're already, you know, doing some stuff with GPIO, doing things with sensors, with uh I don't know, pushing buttons, lighting up light bulbs or whatever, you can do this with meshtastic. I'm going to bring it home real quick and then we'll do a few minutes for questions hopefully. Yep, perfect. I said this a few times, but I don't think I completely finished the thought, which is a good thing. It's on the slide. Antenna in location is more important than power. Most frequently, if you put a proper antenna that is properly uh matched to the frequency you're using, if you put it on top of your house in a very high place, it's

going to be much more important than how much power you're putting into nothing, right? Um so be sure to research what antennas are a good approach to what what you're doing. Identify and prioritize your risk. This is I'm the cavalary. So, uh figure out what it is that you're really trying to solve. Um, are you uh, you know, worried about a flood, uh, an earthquake? Are you worried about roads being blocked? Are you, uh, trying to care for somebody who has a medical condition? Prepare for this before the emergency strikes. Thank you. U, please submit some feedback. Although I think there's a separate feedback loop thing in pre-talks. I'm not sure. U, you can also

hire me. I am unemployed. Uh, and now is the time for Q&A. I'm Slava. Thank you. >> [applause]

>> We got a question over there. >> Uh yes. Uh just curious for clarification. Um if you are a ham operator and you repeat a message that was encrypted by someone else for someone else, do uh part 97 and part 15 come into conflict? um you are responsible for your own actions as a licensed amateur radio operator. So I would say the the wording in part 97 is basically you can't send a coded message. >> Mhm. >> Right. Uh does that mean that you can read a specific part of a book over the air and like somebody else knows the code to it or something like Yeah, absolutely. You can you can have a code

that's um available for Right. Yeah, I think you know what I mean. But I'm stumbling on my words. Um, I think the the answer is no. You you shouldn't or can't do that. But I'm al also not your attorney. So, >> um, we were not able to pull it off this year, but based on this little preview, would the group be open to having a hands-on meshtastic training session, you buy your kit, configure it next year? >> Next year. >> Sweet. I was actually really hoping to do that this year, but next year is perfect. Hi, thanks for the talk. Um, uh, when you mentioned like the GPS, so that obviously requires like a GPS module on

the device. Is there, uh, anything built in or existing for like triangulation based on like response to different um different nodes? >> That's a great question. Uh, so the Heltech V3, the device I had a picture of over there, does not have a built-in GPS module. Uh, but you can buy a GPS sensor that has like four wires you solder on, you set it up in the meshtastic, and it works magically. Uh, there are a lot of other meshtastic uh, supported devices that do have GPS built in. Um, actually the one I have with me uh, does, but it's too far. I'm not going to show it. Um, you had a second part to your question, I forgot.

lacking GPS. Uh what about like um triangulation? >> Oh, triangulation. That's right. Uh there's nothing built into mesttastic uh as far as I know that can do this. Um FCC is really good at triangulating uh people that are messing up the community of the radio waves >> in the packets maybe. Is there like a you know sent at this time like a time stamp and >> Yeah. No. No. If you don't have a GPS module connected to it, then like there's nothing really built in for that. No. >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> Any other questions? >> Certainly. >> On rule 15, what's the power level that you're allowed? >> Uh, I think it's one watt.

>> One watt. >> Yeah, it's it's super tiny. Let's see how fast I can do this. Oh, man. Come on. one watt. Yep, I was right. Um, we can actually also see the wattage allowed. You would be allowed,500 watts as a licensed user, I think. >> I don't know. That's what it says there, but that's a lot of >> That is That is too much. [laughter] >> One thing I'd point out. >> Yeah. This is this is just kind of a general comment. I know everybody think you are correct when you talk about like it's the antenna and its location that matters because you can you could be pumping out 1500 watts peak envelope power as you know the amateur radio

service allows you. But if you're not cited correctly, okay, that just means you're able to transmit but you can't hear anybody. And you know, really two-way communication means you have to be able to equally be able to send and receive uh messages. >> Yeah. >> So, um if you if you've got a bad, you know, a less than ideal antenna and it's not sighted up high, okay, yeah, you might be able to get out. Other people can possibly hear you if you're transmitting 1500 watts, but you're not going to be able to hear them back. >> Yeah, that's that's a very good point. Thank you. you said until it all falls down. So like are you seeing it saturate with too

many nodes local? Like >> Thank you. That's that's that's a great point to make. Uh mechastic is known to fall over at like hacker conferences. I think at Defcon I I heard conflicting reports that like last year it either did fall over or it didn't fall over. Um somebody said that it had like 700 people on it uh and and it was totally fine. Um there across the different channels of Meshtastic it's made to uh do different things if that makes sense. Um so the default mode I mentioned is long fast. That means it transmits far and it transmits very frequently. Um but there's also like medium fast long slow uh f short fast short medium. Like

that's why there are nine channels right? So, um, a lot of communities will actually, uh, move over to a different channel that's not as saturated that, uh, you know, doesn't saturate the channel as much. U,, so that's that's one of the solutions. I don't know what they operate at Defcon this year. Um, but I'm I'm sure that's easy to find out. I think there's a question over there. Thank you. >> Tell more people to do this. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, um, with the with the different channels that aren't long fast, because there's not so much communication because it's not fast and it's not long, uh, you you actually get less channel saturation per user, so you

can have more users. >> Yeah, I just got to say real quick in case you're interested. Um, I'm new to this, too, by the way, but these are some other ones that you could pick up for like 90 bucks, I believe. These both have GPS built in and of course batteries and things, too. Uh, so they're really small. They're really handy. Um, and Defcon, by the way, has a special mesttastic image you could put on there that I think is probably >> cool has settings that are probably meant for it not to fall over. So, if you're curious and you have a device, um, uh, you could put make sure you put on the Defcon version.

>> Awesome. Do you know where we can find that? >> Defcon.tastic.org. >> Thank you. I didn't even know about this. And uh while you were mentioning that uh this is my little guy that fits in a pack of cigarettes. Um what is this uh I forgot what this model is called. I I Oh, it's the T1000E, I think. So, this actually has a built-in GPS module and everything. Um I think this is the end. I'm told to stop. Thank you guys so much for the comments and the feedback and the questions.