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silent 30C3 preroll titles
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applause
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Travis Goodspeed: First I need
to apologize for typesetting this
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in OpenOffice. I know that the
text looks like a ransome note.
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But that's what happens
when you don't use LaTex.
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I'd also like to give a shoutout
call, mallnarf (?) is here,
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and our Dinosaur rock band.
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laughs, applause
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We're a Christian rock band - we're
called 'Jesus lives in the ISS' and
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we know that he is always watching us,
but we think that it's easier for him
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to hear our prayers when
he's, you know, in an orbit
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that passes over us. So we need to use
orbital tracking to know when to pray!
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laughter
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As I'm sure you can guess I'm not
recognized as a legal minority religion
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in Germany. I'd also like to thank skytee
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and Fabienne Serrière and Adam Laurie
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and Jim Geovedi for some
prior satellite tracking work,
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and the scooby crew (?) at Dartmouth
College for all sorts of fun
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whenever I bounce out there.
This is the mission patch
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of the Southern Appalachian
Space Agency (SASA).
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applause and cheers
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This was drawn by Scot Biben (?) and there are
a few pieces of my people's native culture
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that I need to point out here. On the
right the little Dinosaur type thing
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with his finger going out, you might
call him E.T. but we call these things
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'buggers'. They are like this tall, and
they are green and that's why the man
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on the left has a shotgun.
laughter
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Because he doesn't want to be abducted.
You got a satellite dish in the middle
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and it's sitting on sinter blocks because
that's also a piece of my people's
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native culture. There's a moonshine
still in the background.
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That's kind of like Waldcubbet (?), you
make it at home and from corn.
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And then there's the mountain... a piece,
it looks like there are snowpeaks
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on those mountain tops. But our mountains
aren't tall enough to have snow.
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These are actually that we've blown off
the lids of the mountains for coal mining.
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Which is another piece of
my people's native culture.
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And at the top, in space you can see
the ISS, and you can see a banana,
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and you can see what I think is a bulb.
This is to signify space trash.
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I mean there's a lot of stuff up there.
And, you know it's symbolism that matters
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in these things, you know?
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At BerlinSides, in May of 2012
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I did a lecture on reverse
engineering the SPOT Connect.
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The SPOT Connect is a litte
hockey puck type thing
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– this is what it looks like.
And these things are great.
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It weighs a bit more than your cell phone
but it runs off of a couple of batteries,
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it connects to your phone by Bluetooth.
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Originally these were emergency locator
beacons. So if you're going hiking...
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have any of you seen the movie where
the guy has to cut off his arm
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with a dull knife? If you're hiking and
you don't want that same experience
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you buy one of these things. And
then there's an emergency button
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you can push that transmits your
GPS coordinates by satellite
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to rescue workers. But that was boring,
so they had to add social media.
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laughs, laughter
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So in addition to keeping you
from chewing off your own arm
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this device will also allow you to
tweet and make Facebook posts.
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laughs, laughter
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The idea is that as you're running...
here I'm crossing the Schuylkill River
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in Philadelphia and the Android
phone on the left is making a post.
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And I did an article on reverse-
engineering the Bluetooth side
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of these things. Because... I use a weird
brand of phone that Microsoft killed off,
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and I'm terribly bitter about it. But
I also figured out the physical layer.
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And that's what this diagram shows.
This transmits at 1.6125 GHz.
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And it sends a pseudo-random stream, so
each one of these zeros is a long chunk
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where it's bouncing back and forth
between 2 different frequencies.
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And the same for the ones.
But the way that the pattern works
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is that it switches the signal whenever
it is going from the 0 signal
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to the 1 signal. And internally, there are
these little pops that you can actually
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identify on a Software Defined Radio
recording. And this is how you can
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reverse-engineer the signal that
the SPOT Connect is sending up
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to its satellite network.
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Everything is clear text on this.
And it's completely unencrypted.
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It just has your serial number, your GPS
coordinates, and a bit of ASCII text.
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So if you listen on this frequency and
you have the correct recording software
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you can actually watch all of the SPOT
Connect messages that are transmitting
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up from your location. And this would be
great except that this is designed for
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hiking in areas where there's no cell
phone service. So having an antenna
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on the uplink frequency is kind of
useless. You know you would actually
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have to go out to a national park, find
some guy who is about to chew his arm off,
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and then you could listen to his uplink
where he is like tweeting: "Hey, I'm gonna
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chew my arm off", you know?
laughter
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So that's great as a proof of concept
but it's not really anything practical.
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The current state of that was that I knew
the protocol and I could sniff the uplinks.
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But I wanted to sniff the downlinks. So
it's easy for me to get the thing that
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goes up to the satellite. But what I wanted
was what comes down from the satellite.
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And that requires a satellite dish. But
a geo-stationary dish isn't good enough
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because the satellites that run this
network – there are a lot of them,
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it's called the Globalstar network,
they fly really low across the earth,
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and they fly across the earth in very
tight, very fast orbits. So they'll move
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from horizon to horizon in 15 to 20
minutes. Which means that you either need
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like a sweat shop army of kids
trying to aim the satellite dish
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as it's going across or you need
to make it computer-controlled.
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Stepping back from the SPOT
Connect for a little bit, and
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discussing some prior research.
Adam Laurie did some work
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with geostationary satellites.
These are the satellites that stay
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in one position in the sky.
He gave two sets of talks
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– one in 2008 and the second in
2010. And he used a DVB-S card
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connected to a satellite dish with
a diseqc motor, so that it could move
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the satellite dish left and right in order
to scan a region of the horizon.
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His tool is publicly available,
it's called satmap.
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You can grab it at this URL.
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And then after he finds a signal he has
a feed scanner. Normally when you use
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Satellite TV you provider gives you
a listing of the frequencies, and
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your provider gives you an exact orbital
position to aim your satellite dish at.
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But Adam's tool allows you to scan to
see which frequencies are in use and
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which protocols are in use, once
you've correctly aimed your dish.
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And he also describes a technique
for moving your dish left and right
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while doing this in order to
identify where the satellites are.
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This recording here is from
a re-implementation that I made
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of Adam's work, in order to
catch up with it. In this diagram
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the x-axis - because you move left
and right - that shows the azimuth,
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that shows how far left or right my
satellite dish has moved. And then
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the y-axis shows the frequency. And
all of these dots are strong signals.
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So every vertical bar in which you see
chunks of frequencies, that's a satellite.
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But these stay in the same position. So
it's easy for me to repeat this experiment.
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It's easy for me to re-run it, and to find
the same satellites in the same position.
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It's easy to debug this.
But it can't move in elevation.
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This diagram is actually
a very small slice of the sky.
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We're looking at a single line,
maybe 10 degrees across.
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Maybe only 5 degrees across.
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So hacking Ku-band – the television
satellites – has the advantage
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that you can use cheap standardized
hardware. I bought one of these DVB-S cards
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in Mauerpark, in Berlin for 3 Euro. You
can use standardized disecq motors,
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you can buy them at a satellite TV shop.
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TV signals come with video feeds
so you can actually see pictures.
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There was a scandal about 4..5 years
ago where they were finding
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drone [control] feeds that were being
bounced across these satellites.
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In the nineties it was very popular to
listen to the sort of unedited sections
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of interviews, when people would
be interviewed over a satellite,
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before Skype and such
things became options. And
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there are also networking signals here
using TCP/IP packets. So you can actually
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turn your DVB-S card into
a promiscuous ethernet adapter,
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and start sniffing all of the traffic that
comes across. This is also a great way
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to get free downlink bandwidth. Because
you can just flood packets at an address
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that, you know, will be routed to you, or several addresses, and then you sniff it out as the legitimate receiver ignores them. But it also has
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some disadvantages. It only works with
geostationary satellites. If the satellite
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is not staying in the same position
relative to the ground then you can't
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track it. Your dish also moves very
slowly. And it only moves left and right.
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It won't move up and down. And you're
limited to standardized signals.
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While it's great that you get video and
TCP/IP you're never going to get anything
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weird. You're not gonna get any mobile
data, you're not going to get any
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Brazilian truck-drivers – we will get to
those in a bit. laughs
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I misspoke, you actually will get Brazilian
truck-drivers in this. So I bought
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a satellite dish. One of the best things
about living in America is that you can
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buy industrial hardware cheap as dirt
on ebay. I know things aren't likely
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used to being a cat XXXX by human children
anymore. But this satellite dish here
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on the left – the one in the radome –
that's my dish. And to the right,
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that's the boat that it came from.
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applause
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This came from a military ship.
But the dish itself is also available
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for civilian use on very large yachts. The
dish itself is a Felcom 81 and it was
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intended for use with a network called
Inmarsat. Imarsat allows for
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telephone connections, and also data
connections when you're on a boat.
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So if the crew wants to call home
or wants to go to AOL Keywords
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or whatever was popular back when
this was common they could do that.
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And the dish was desgined to sit
at the very top of a ships' mast.
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The reason why is that at the top of
the mast there aren't any obstructions
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– it has a clear view of the sky in all
directions. But there's a complication
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with being on the top of the mast. Which
is that the ship is rocking beneath you
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and you're moving more than the rest the
ship. So they have stepper motors for
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azimuth, elevation and tilt. And then
they have spinning gyroscopes.
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Back before the iPhone there was this dark,
dark time when gyroscopes actually spun.
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And this is the sort of gyroscope that
it has. It actually has 4 of them so
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that it can measure its movement. And then
it has a control computer. So the idea is
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that the dish itself can be moved while
remaining absolutely stable with regard to
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the gyroscopes. So it compensates for
the rocking of the ship beneath it as it's
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targeting a stationary satellite.
In America this costs 250 Dollars, but
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it's electronics equipment. So while you
think that would only be a 180 Euro
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it's more like 2500. And that's before
import duties and it being impounded.
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We also have this lovely culture in which
people love excuses to use their trucks.
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So the guy that I bought this from offered
to deliver it to my home from the 200 dollars.
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It was an 11 hour drive. But if you wanted
this you'd have to bring it back in your
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carry-on luggage, and it could be awkward.
I got this dish and I decided I had to do
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something with it. So I created the
Southern Appalachians Space Agency.
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I'm from the state of Tennessee, formerly
known as the State of Franklin until
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North Carolina invaded us. It's ok,
I know Europeans suck at history.
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laughs
laughter
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Now I'm trying to think of how to show
you on a map where Tennessee is
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without having a map but, you know, it's
okay I know you suck at geography and
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we forget (?)
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From audience: It's very
near Texas, to the north.
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Travis: Texas is our first colony. But
it's actually a decent drive to the east.
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Due east (?). You don't
actually have to go anyways.
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So what I did was I took these motors
which were designed to be able to move
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the satellite dish to compensate
for the rocking the ship and
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I re-purposed them to track through
the sky while the ground is stable.
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We don't have very many earthquakes in
Tennessee. The last one that we had
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made rivers run the wrong direction. But
it's okay – it's a geography thing. So
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this allows me to track things that
are moving through the sky. But it
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doesn't actually matter where they're
moving in the sky because that's
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just a software problem. So in addition to
tracking objects that are in low-earth orbit
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by a software patch I can also track things
that are in deep space. It's not much harder
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to track deep space probes or stars than
it is to track items in low-earth orbit.
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And then I added a software defined radio
which allows me to record a signal now
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and demodulate it later. Which is necessary
if you intend to reverse-engineer a signal.
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Because a lot of the downlinks from these
satellites are completely non... completely
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undocumented. And being able to tune in to
the right frequency is only half of it.
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You also need a recording of sufficient
quality that you can reverse-engineer
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after the fact. We are sort of spoiled by
software defined radios. When doing
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software defined radio work we usually
have a very good signal to work from.
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So having high quality signals for later
reverse-engineering is necessary.
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I really wanted to be able to identify
undocumented downlinks for low-earth orbit
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in the same way that we already do this
for geo-stationary orbit, using tools
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like the ones that Adam Loria and Jin XXX
made. So I built a software framework
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as a collection of Python daemons. And
these run across a home area network
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in my house. There's a Beaglebone inside
of the Radome. And an x86 server
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in the house. Or AMD64, whatever the kids
call it these days. And then I used Postgres
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for coordination. So that all of these
daemons can talk to each other without...
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without me really caring which machine
they're on. So for maintenance I can have
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my laptop pretending to be the dish,
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and can have stepper motors on my desk,
and I can watch them spin, and I can even
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make a model of the dish and swap these
components in and out without the rest of
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the network being confused. This also
allows for sequal (?) injec... attacks to
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physically move my dish. Which is why the
Sassin (?) network is not on one of those
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fancy WEB 2.0 things. Because of you could
inject, say, update targets at Namical's (?)
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Voyager 1. Then my dish would physically
move and start tracking Voyager 1
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through the sky. Voyager 2 doesn't
actually come into the sky because of
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my position in the Northern hemisphere.
So, it's okay, I know you suck at geography.
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But Voyager 1 is going up, and Voyager 2
is going down. There's a Realtek
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Software Defined Radio for the radio
reception. Although these things
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are garbage. So I'm in the process of
replacing this for the HackRF. There's
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also an EiBot board for motor control.
We'll get back to that in a minute.
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And there's an Inertial Measurement Unit
from Vectornerve (?) which actually measures
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using the fancy MEMS gyroscopes and
a MEMS compass how I'm moving.
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This isn't accurate enough to target the
dish, so instill (?) the counting steps
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to move the dish. But it is accurate
enough to tell me when my belts
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have broken. Or when I'm up
against the physical obstruction.
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This is skytee helping me out with the
dish. He's zip-tying it. Because, you know
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we know everything about duct tape where
I come from, but we know nothing
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about zip ties. So I had to bring in
a German engineer.
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laughter
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We call him a Gerry wigger (?) but, you know...
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This is the satellite dish itself. And you
can sort of see in this photograph
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where we've strapped on the equipment.
There's like an embillica (?) cord. Or more
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like a spinal column that actually runs up
the back of the dish. So we just added
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new cables onto that line. And then
zip-tied them in place. And skytee came up
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with all these crazy ideas like that
we should use chains and zip-ties
-
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to make sure that the cables don't tear
themselves out. And that worked
-
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tremendoudly well in practice. So, as this
thing spins around by the original design
-
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there's a ring connector that all of the
signals go through. That all of the
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networking goes through. That all of the
rest goes through. And that worked
-
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in the nineties because it had no reason
to send anything faster than 9600 baud.
-
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But with the modern signals going across
it - I need 100MBit/s or even GB ethernet.
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That's not enough. I need more than
2 wires. So there's a cable that comes
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across it, and then I rely on the
software to keep it from wrapping
-
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that cable around itself. So it can only
move, say, 400 degrees around.
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But that's still more than a full circle.
So by stopping halfway and moving back
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I can prevent it from getting stacked (?).
We've got the Beaglebone on the left,
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in the middle there's a USB hub, and
on the right is the motor controller.
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The Beaglebone runs Debian Linux. And
takes care of sending the software defined
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radio recordings over the network. It also
takes care of updating the motor positions
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to be the ones that the database declares
should be current. The stepper motors
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themselves are the originals that the dish
was designed with. And they're running
-
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to an EiBot Board. The EiBot board was
intended for plotting on Easter eggs
-
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laughs
I feel, you know... is that neat?
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laughs
applause
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So you can actually aim a satellite dish
that's as tall as you are, with of these
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fancy motors using less sophisticated
equipment than what's used
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in a 3D printer. Don't panic, though.
It's a hell of a lot more reliable
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than a 3D printer. But we needed
some sort of backup. In addition
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to the inertial measurement unit telling
us when the device had snagged itself.
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It would also help to have a visual
queue. Because the satellite dish
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sits in Tennessee, and while I love my
home town, and, you know I'm very
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proud of being Tennesseean it's also
a long way to travel when you need
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to re-orient the dish. Using an
accelerometer it's easy enough
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to correct the elevation. Because you can
use the accelerometer as a level, and
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you can use that to tell how high up the
dish is pointing, at an absolute scale.
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But the compass isn't very accurate. So
instead, as a backup we have a webcam
-
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that's taped to the top. Taping
is my people's native culture.
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We have it taped to the top, and then
it's pointing backwards. So this gives us
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like a rear view camera, from the
dish's position. So as the dish sits
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inside of its radome... - junk cars in the XXX
are also my people's native tradition!
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So the dish sits there next to my
brother's Toyota Supra. And that thing,
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you know, that thing flies as soon as it
gets an engine put back in it. So it is -
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sits there and it's moving. But externally
you can't see where it is. Which means
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that I can't call my family in Tennessee
and blackmail them into - yet again -
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looking at my dish to tell where it's
pointed. There are bolts that hold this
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down. It takes half an hour to remove the
lid, another half an hour to put it back on.
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So instead we took the radome...
that's Frank, he's my cat.
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Give a "Cheers!" for Frank!
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applause and cheers
-
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Yeah, we had such a great time with Frank.
And we never knew that she was pregnant.
-
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If you happen to need kittens and wanna
pay the custom's fees I'll hook you up!
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So then we took tape and ran tape down the
edges of the radome, and then marked it.
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So from the markings you can tell
which clock position the back
-
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of the satellite dish is pointing at. So
if you point the dish towards 12:00
-
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you know that you're roughly at 6:00,
so you know that it's pointing South.
-
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And then you can sort of scan the sky
for a stationary target, and navigate
-
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off of that, to recover your position.
Software-wise... Remember,
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the whole thing runs through Postgres,
so I just tunnel the Postgres over SSH,
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and then I wrote a Python client that
displays the satellite positions and
-
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the satellite state in PiGame (?). This is
intended for making those games (?)
-
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really see the rabbit. And the rabbit
jumps on the other rabbit. But it... works!
-
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And it works perfectly well enough
to target the dish. Because all that
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this software has to do is plot the
positions of the satellites, and
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give orders back to the database when
I click on a satellite, or click on a position.
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It can also display stars. So the red
items are satellites which are not selected.
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The green item is Ghost3 (?) which is
the satellite that I'm targeting. And then
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the white items are stars in the sky. Now
this is a plot in which the azimuth is
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on the X axis, and the elevation is on the
Y axis. But I can also arrange it into
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a polar plot. Which sort of gives me an
upside-down view of the satellite dish
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looking at the sky. I doubt you can read
it, but just above the green circle
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in the center, that's Polaris which is the
North star. It's also weird because,
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you know, working on this, you know,
I thought that I got really good at astronomy
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until I realized that I only knew what the
stars looked like during the day.
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laughter
laughs
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And it being PiGame (?) you can actually
run it on a mobile device. So the same client
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that runs on my laptop can also run
on my Nokia N900. laughs
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applause
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A significant portion of the GUI client for
this was written while stuck on the U-Bahn,
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connected over 3G, SSH through, and just
using emacs on the phone. laughter
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laughs
applause
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If you're one of those people who needs to
complain about the N900 being too old,
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it also runs on the N9. And then,
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you can take the data out of this,
and run it through scientific software.
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In addition of the software defined radio
recordings themselves being dumped out
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to a text file or a binary file on disk
you can also dump out things like
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the received signal strength indicators
(RSSI). So this is a screenshot in which
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I'm identifying different satellites that
I've seen in the sky. Based upon
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their downlink signal peaks. You can see
the noise floor there, at the bottom,
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and then there's a rather strong signal on
the left. And a weaker neverware (?) signal
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on the right. Now, the daemons that build
this up... you need an orbit prediction daemon.
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Because you need to know where the
satellites are, and where they're going,
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and where they will be by
the time you get to them.
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You need to update the orbits themselves.
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LEO satellites are described in TLE files.
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These are called 'Two Line Entry'. And
they're called Two Line Entry because
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they're three lines long.
laughter
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These were originally used by Norad for
inter-continental ballistic missile tracking.
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And because a ballistic missile is
basically in orbit, it's just that that
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orbit happens to collide with the earth.
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But this format isn't terribly accurate
for satellites that adjust their own orbit.
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So anything that has fuel, or has engines,
or changes mass will vary it's position.
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And this also doesn't account for drag.
Because, you know, the missile itself,
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you know it goes up it goes down, it's
not orbiting enough for the light drag
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in the upper atmosphere to matter. But for
a satellite it does. So these Two Line Entries
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will work for a matter of days or maybe
a couple of weeks. But they don't last
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longer than that. So you need a daemon
that grounds (?) the new files from spacetrack.
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And this is just a matter of like
a recursive WGET, and then
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parsing the files. And that still needs
to be done. You also need motor control,
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because you need to move the dish
physically to track your target.
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You need input for the Inertial
Measurement Unit. This comes over
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a low voltage serial port. And then
you need radio daemons to handle
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spectrum analysis or downlink recording.
And, these, you'll have several of them,
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you have to swap them out. So you'll begin
by using the spectrum analyzer to identify
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that your aim is accurate, that you're
accurately tracking the targets
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well enough to get a recording from
them. And then after that you begin
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to take software defined recordings off
them. And, eventually, you might have
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a standalone application that parses what
you're receiving. Such as the Osmocom guys
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did with OpenGMR. So for orbit prediction
I began with a DOS program that had been
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ported to Unix, called 'predict'.
And this works, but it's garbage.
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It only supports 20 satellites plus the
sun, the moon, Venus and Mars.
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But no other planets because it's designed
for astronomy photographers who want
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to get a picture of something as it comes
over the horizon. You know, I need
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to track hundreds of targets. And then
write a script to opportunistically pick
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the ones that I want to record.
Because otherwise you have to like set
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an alarm clock for the half-hour pass in
which you can play with something.
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That software does allow you to query the
results by UDP, though. So you can just
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send it a flood of request packets,
then it will flood back with the data
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you're looking for. So I switched to
a library called PiFM which allows you
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to track hundreds of birds. It has no UDP
nonsense. It will also calculate satellites,
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planets and stars. And the really nifty (?)
thing about this is that you tell it...
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you know, it being a library you tell it
when to update the individual object
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that you're interested in. So you can
update objects that are out of view
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or uninteresting more slowly than the
ones that you care about.
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So I managed to track every single
item in geo-stationary orbit.
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This thick ring here is the clarke-bell(?)
of all satellites in geo-stationary orbit
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as viewed from my Southern horizon.
applause
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The Two Line Entry files you can get
freely from CELESTRAK.COM.
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So this is just a simple script that grabs
them and then inserts them.
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And the prediction daemon will actually
select them as it is loading up.
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This all inter process communication is
running through this Postgres database.
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And this daemon can be moved to
a different machine if I needed
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more computing power, or anything like
that. The motor control demon...
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well, the Eibot board is designed to take
stepper motor commands. It shows up
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as USB Serial device on Linux. So as
I plug it in to the Beaglebone it appears
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as /dev/ttyACM0. And the baud rate doesn't
matter. Because this is a USB device.
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You could then send it simple commands.
Like 'SM,3000,500,-400' means that I wanna
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move a stepper motor for 3000 ms. I want
the first motor to move 500 forwards,
-
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that's UP, and the second one to move
400 LEFT which is backwards 400 steps.
-
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And then it will count that out, and
then it sends me back an OK.
-
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If I want to disable the motors, I send
'EM,0,0'. This allows the motors to be
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freely spun. Because normally a stepper
motor will physically hold its position,
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you need to turn them off in
order to slide the dish around.
-
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'EM,1,1' will enable both motors
in 1/16-of-a-step mode.
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Stepper motors can do fractional
steps because they're
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holding themselves in position.
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You can see the motors themselves
with the belts and the geartrain.
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This thing on the right would probably
be illegal for me to turn on.
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The thing on the right is a 250 W amplifier.
-
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The stepper motors themselves just have
6 wires. In a lot of 3D printer type stuff
-
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they ignore the middle two. So you just
drop (?) off the middle two wires, you run
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the other four to your stepper
controller, and you're good to go.
-
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The belts and stuff need to be measured
in order to figure out exactly
-
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what the georeduction (?) is. Because you
need to know how many steps form a degree.
-
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The IMU unit, this Vectornav VN100 (?),
it's a MEMS gyroscope and accelerometer
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and a compass in a single box.
It costs $500 which was
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more than all of the other
equipment put together.
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The compass is confused by the stepper
motors because the compass is measuring
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magnetic fields. So you need to
mount this physically as far away
-
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from the stepper motors as possible. And
the gyroscope is confused by motor jerk (?)
-
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which is a shame because stepper motors
work as a series of jerks (?) rather than
-
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as a single consistent motion. And the
accelerometer is confused by gimble lock,
-
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so you have to switch it to
a quaternian (?) mode in order to get
-
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consistent values out of it. And if I had
to do this over again I'd really try
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to drop this piece of garbage. But it's
a lovely technology when it works.
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some laughter
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Now for position calculations, the
elevation itself comes from the IMU.
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The azimuth comes from the motor daemon.
This is because the accelerometer
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can very accurately tell which way
the earth's gravity is pulling it
-
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whereas the accelerometer has to integrate
jerks (?) over time in order to figure out
-
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its position. So the
accelerometer will drift
-
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and the compass will be confused by the
magnetic fields while the elevation is
-
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just a single accelerometer
that doesn't drift.
-
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And the IMU will become
a backup for these things
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in order to figure out how to make
it reliable. But at the moment
-
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the position measurement is infinitely
more reliable. The tilt motor
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I'm not using at present because on
a ship that's rocking it's necessary
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to tilt the dish. On a satellite dish
that's staying still the only useful
-
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tilting the dish is so that you can follow
the arc of a satellite through the sky
-
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by only moving a single motor.
Photopgrapher do this when they're
-
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trying to get long exposures of moving
satellites. At the moment my software
-
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doesn't support this feature. But
if it turns out to be necessary
-
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to get higher quality
recordings I might add it.
-
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The radio daemons. The
first is a spectrum analyzer.
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This just measures the signal strength
on each frequency. And it does it by the
-
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power spectral density function.
-
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And the strength itself will
vary with the position error.
-
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So this allows you to figure out how
far off you are by sort of testing,
-
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by overshooting just a little bit,
or undershooting just a little bit
-
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to center on your target. The downlink
recorder dumps the IQ values
-
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in the software defined radio
directly to an NFS share,
-
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which can later be decoded and
read and reverse-engineered.
-
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We've got a whole table of spectrum
data. And then I plot that in a tool
-
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called Viewpoints which NASA releases
for dealing with giant scatterplots
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in multiple dimensions. Each view takes
two dimensions, and it's tons of fun.
-
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The client GUI is this PyGame. I have
Postgres for communications, and
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the server does all the heavy lifting,
so the Beaglebone itself never has
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to do anything complicated with
regards to software defined radio.
-
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This is also about these faint blue lines
are positions at which I've seen
-
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particularly strong signals in order to
identify which satellites are active
-
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and which ones are inactive.
Because satellites die over time.
-
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And particularly useful targets, we're
reverse-engineering satellites that are
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out-of-commission or outdated.
I'm running out of time by these markers.
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Does this mean that we're skipping
questions, or does that mean that
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I need to be off the stage?
mumbling to stage
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Not having Q&A, okay. So today I get
accurate tracking of satellites.
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And this thing can run unattended 24h
a day for months without maintenance.
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Like I said: it's nothing like a 3D printer.
laughter
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It takes software defined radio
recordings, it can provide maps
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of views of different satellites in the
sky. The next step is I want to publish
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a 'port scan' of the entire sky. So which
frequencies are in use on which birds,
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for every bird that ever comes above
Tennessee, on every downlink that fits
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my antenna. As well as a database
of software defined radio recordings.
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If anyone would care to donate a truckload
of disks - that might be handy.
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I'd also like to make other ground
stations. The software that I've written
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ought to be portable to new hardware.
So there's nothing that should keep you
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from being able to port this to run on
your own dish. And I have a large yard,
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so I could conceivably have
a dozen of these things.
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Another way that you can do it, and
the way that it's traditionally done
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for stationary (?)(?)(?) satellites is having
Yagis or other loosely directional antennas
-
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in order to receive the signals.
I went with a dish because I wanted
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more selectivity. I wanted to be able to
get reverse-engineerable recordings
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rather than intentional ones for which
I already knew the downlink protocol.
-
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So this is my van, my van is amazing.
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applause
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Thanks to Nick Farr. I had a bit too
much to drink in Montreal and
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I called Nick Farr and I said: "Nick,
I want a dukw", like these amphibious
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troop transport vehicles. And Nick
said: "Sorry, I can't get you one but
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you want a news-van. And I said:
"Hell yeah, I want a news van!"
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So - this pole in the background, that's
not a lighting pole. That's actually
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part of the van.
laughter
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This is the antenna retracted. This mast
goes up 20m by pneumatic power.
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There's an air compressor in the back.
Here is the control panel, there's
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an air-conditioned office in the middle.
laughter
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laughs
This has four 19" server racks as well
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as A/V equipment that was left over.
I was particularly excited about
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the video monitor which supports PAL
which you folks are familiar with,
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NTSC or "Never The Same Color"
which is my people's native culture...
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laughter
But most importantly, it does SECAM,
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the system essentially contrary
to the American method.
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laughter and applause
laughs
-
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So in addition to my radio equipment
I'm adding my Soviet PDP-11 which was...
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laughs
...and that's not a joke. I have a Soviet
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PDP-11 thanks to the kind folks at the
Positive Hacking Days conference.
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This is the control panel,
and that's my talk!
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applause
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Herald: Thank you so much. There
actually is time for Q&A now.
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Travis: Well, first I'd like to introduce
you to my cat. If we could go back
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to the prior image. This is Frank!
We didn't know it at that time, but
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Frank was not dead when this picture was
taken. If you'd like kittens get in touch!
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Okay. Are there any questions?
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Question: Great talk. What's the most
interesting signal you decoded so far?
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Travis: At the moment I'm sort of stuck
at the L band range. Because of filters
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that I have yet to remove. So everything
gets attenuated, and becomes annoyingly
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quiet outside of the 1.5..1.6 -ish range.
The Globalstar network is what I'm most
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interested in targeting next. I cam't wait
to see what people are tweeting
-
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while they should be enjoying nature.
-
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Herald: Is there a question
from the internet?
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Signal Angel: Yeah, the internet has
many questions. So first one was:
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Is there really no authentication or
encryption on the Q band IP services?
-
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So you can just spoof at will? And can the
birds see the physical leakage and of
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the source accurately enough to find who
is spoofing?
-
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Travis: I'm not an expert in Ku band. The...
for the downlink the bird has no clue
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as to the location of the dish. Because
you're only listening. They can roughly
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figure out your geographic area because...
they need to figure out where
-
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the spot beam is going. So they might know
whether you're in, say, Germany or
-
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in France. But they won't know whether
you're in Heidelberg or Mannheim.
-
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They do have forms of authentication for
many satellite networks. Satellite TV
-
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is one of the best-protected network
services. Because of the satellite wars
-
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in the 90's. In which TV pirates would
fight back and forth with smart card
-
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designers. But there are also many
unencrypted links. And there are...
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because of standard protocols those
are particularly easy to find in Ku band.
-
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Question: You've been talking about
using RTLSDR from osmocom.
-
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And you were talking about your spectrum
analysis program. Is this one working
-
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with RTLSDR?
-
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Travis: So... RTLSDR... so I'm using
the RTLSDR not the osmo-sdr.
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Which are separate. The spectrum
analyzer is working with the RTLSDR.
-
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My complaint about the RTLSDR is that
when you have a strong signal next to
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a weak signal the weak signal is
utterly useless for interpretation.
-
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Question: Okay. Thank you.
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Herald: Another question
from the internet?
-
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Signal Angel: Okay, next question from the
internet is: how do you record the radio signal
-
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from the dish, at what sampling rate?
-
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Travis: The RTLSDR samples at 2 million
samples per second. As soon as I switch it
-
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over to the HackRF, well, we're having
20 million samples per second.
-
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The sampling rate can be reduced once
the bandwidth of the signal is known.
-
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For radio (?) storage. And the recordings
can also be compressed.
-
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But it's still a hell of a lot of storage.
-
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Herald: Any other questions?
-
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Signal Angel: The internet
has more questions...
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Herald: Okay...
-
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Signal Angel: Did you look into obtaining
a capacity of IBAN with copper (?), as used
-
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for the rotary gentries in CT scanners?
Those can apparently transmit contactless
-
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several GBytes per
second, bi-directionally.
-
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Travis: I've not looked into those.
It seemed better to have an Umbellaco (?)
-
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cable and to be careful not to snap it.
-
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The whole thing was done for a budget
of less than 2000 Dollars, and can be
-
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recreated for less than a budget of 1000
[Dollars]. And they... so we tried to avoid
-
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fancy parts. The local radio shack loved
us because we'd swing in and buy all sorts
-
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of crazy stuff. As soon as we told them
that we wanted the satellite dish to
-
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dance Gangnam style...
laughs
-
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laughter
-
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Thank you Carnaugh(?)
-
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applause
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-
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I will stop now. Please continue my work, thanks!
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