Paging all Radio Curious Hackers

After years of thinking about and learning about how radios work, I figured it was high-time to start to more aggressively share the things i’ve been learning. I had a ton of fun at DistrictCon year 0, so it was a pretty natural place to pitch an RF-focused introductory talk.

I was selected for Year 1, and able to give my first ever RF related talk about how to set off restaurant pagers (including one on stage!) by reading and writing IQ directly using a little bit of stdlib only Python.

This talk is based around the work I’ve written about previously (here, here and here), but the “all-in-one” form factor was something I was hoping would help encourage folks out there to take a look under the hood of some of the gear around them.

(In case the iframe above isn’t working, direct link to the YouTube video recording is here)

I’ve posted my slides from the talk at PARCH.pdf to hopefully give folks some time to flip through them directly.

All in all, the session was great – It was truly humbling to see so many folks interested in hearing me talk about radios. I had a bit of an own-goal in picking a 20 minute form-factor, so the talk is paced wrong (it feels like it went way too fast). Hopefully being able to see the slides and pause the video is helpful.

We had a short ad-hoc session after where I brought two sets of pagers and my power switch; but unfortunately we didn’t have anyone who was able to trigger any of the devices on their own (due to a mix of time between sessions and computer set-up). Hopefully it was enough to get folks interested in trying this on their own!