June Personal Telco Meeting Notes
Location: ItsaBeautifulPizza Scribe: SamChurchill
* 6:00PM - Introduction to Personal Telco for new comers
6:30PM - Intro to RF and Q&A by Dr. Morris Engelson (MorrisEngelsonHandouts)
We hold monthly meetings. Typically there will be one or two short presentations, a question and answer session followed by general chit-chat. It's all very relaxed so please feel free to come join us.
[http://www.yourpalbill.com/tripplan/ Find your way] via TriMet to
{{{It's A Beautiful Pizza 3341 SE Belmont Portland, OR (503) 233-5444}}}
If you would like something to this page please feel free to add it, just be sure to add your name next to it so we know who put it there.
AdamShand is the group director
LucasSheehan is meeting facilitator
SamChurchill and LucasSheehan keep the MeetingNotes
* The June PersonalTelco meeting was at the same place (It's a Beautiful Pizza), but a different location. Beautiful Pizza moved across the street ([http://www.portlandtribune.com/archview.cgi?id=12295 and got slapped with a $36,000 "moving fee"] by The City. Nice place, though. Creative and acid nostalgic.
It's not hard to find a PersonalTelco meetings - just look for a satellite truck. Amusingly, a 1958 vintage fire truck pulled up during the meeting. The owner, who bought his vehicle on E-Bay, is planning to drive it to Burning Man. He says it's a great vehicle for picking up his kids after school.
Anyway...
The Van was positioned on the North side of the street and aimed at Psychonautical Supplies where PersonalTelco has a node. The plan: webcast the June meeting live. [http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/ChristianSeppa?action=highlight&value=CategoryHomepage ChristianSeppa] brought a video camera, tripod and mikes. The video was compressed using Real Producer, then run up the mast on the van using a 14db gain Yagi, which is captured at PsychonauticalSupplies then relayed up to MattWestervelt's RealVideo server in Seattle. Matt, who works as an administrator at RealNetworks in Seattle, generously offered his server facilities.
It would have worked, too. But it was a hot day, the M-1 box got too hot to touch and the signal started to fade and skip. So we abandoned the live video plans. Christian taped the proceedings and is posting it on Don Park's server, here. The new location at Beautiful Pizza proved to be very noisy, (in an analog, beer-drinking sense). But the talk by Dr. Morris Engelson on Radio Frequency was enthusiastically recieved by all (who could hear).
June Personal Telco Meeting
* Adam explained briefly the mission of PersonalTelco.
* First Timers: Nigel asked for hands of first timers with about 8 people raising their hands. Each person explained their interests.
* Morris Engelson: Dr Egleton, who was the chief RF guru at Tektronics, had a handout and delivered the featured presentation; a primer on Radio Frequency. It included the basics of modulation (AM, FM and Phase Modulation) and how digital signals get compressed and transmitted (PSK, Direct Sequency, COFDM, etc). How and why the FCC does what it does was also covered. He was entertaining and covered the field in a manner that was engaging and illuminating. I found myself listening instead of taking notes. However most of his talk covered basic RF theory and practice which can be researched on the web. Here is his biography and more notes on his talk.
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* Don Park's Talk on AP Radar: DonPark discussed an open source project called ApRadar. Slides are at [http://klickitat.yi.org/~donp/talks http://klickitat.yi.org/~donp/talks] and you can see a video of the presentation [http://klickitat.yi.org/ptp-june here]. * * Past SpecialOps Team members include: AdamShand, DanRichardson, MichaelCodanti and DonPark. Current active SpecialOps Team members include; AndrewWoods, JerrittCollord, NigelBallard, and JohnGreet. Want to be a Special Ops team member? It requires advanced Linux (DebianLinux), networking and wireless skills with 1-2 hours week. Help is also need for documentation so users can figure out what to do in case something goes terribly wrong. Think you can hack it? Don Park has more: http://klickitat.yi.org/~donp/ptpops/ * * * * * * John Mackie is a ham operator who has a repeater on a tower on the hills. He was planning to control it remotely via 900 MHz but now is thinking about 2.4Ghz. Adam and others thought this was an ideal situation; a repeater or access point on a tower would be near ideal. Once again your scribe did not get an email or phone number for John Mackie. He is the chief engineer at KBOO and has been a radio engineer for 20 years. * * The meeting ajourned about 9pm and reassembled outside around the SatelliteTruck. Much fun was had by all. Erik and Nigel requested that anyone interested in van painting should see them. PersonalTelco must remove the channel 6 designation before it is used publically. - Sam Churchill