Amateur Radio Village at EMF 2014

EMF 2012 badge of attendee Graham Shirville G3VZV

EMF 2012 badge of attendee Graham Shirville G3VZV

There will be an amateur radio village and special event station GB2EMF at the Electromagnetic Field EMF 2014 event taking place August 29-31 at Bletchley near Milton Keynes.

EMF 2014 is a festival for anyone interested in radio, electronics, space, homebrewing, robots, UAVs, 3D printing, DIYBio, Internet culture or pretty much anything else you can think of. It is a volunteer effort by a non-profit group, inspired by European and US hacker camps like Chaos Communication Camp, HAR, and toorcamp.

Imagine a camping festival with a power grid and high-speed internet access; a temporary village of geeks, crafters, and technology enthusiasts that’s lit up by night, and buzzing with activity during the day. Over a thousand curious people will descend on the friendly open space to learn, share, and talk about what they love.

Over a long weekend, you can expect to see a huge variety of talks across three stages, a slew of workshops, as well as music, games, and installations dotted around the site.

Attendees are invited to set up their own villages — camps within the camp — where like-minded people can camp together and put on their own activities. The hard-working EMF team of volunteers will supply you with power and internet to your tent.

The special event station GB2EMF will be run from the Amateur Radio Village, it had been hoped to have a 70cm/2m crossband FM repeater operational during the event but it looks as though Ofcom licensing issues may preclude this.

At each EMF event the organisers try and give the attendees a great camp badge. Not just a ‘Hello my name is” sticker but a nice fun piece of technology that they can take away and use after the event.

EMF 2014 takes place August 29-31 near Newton Longville, just South of Bletchley, Milton Keynes, MK17 0BU. Talks include:
• High Altitude Ballooning by Adam Greig M0RND
• Amateur Radio – Practical Sign offs by Paul
• Amateur Radio: The Original Nerd Hobby! by Ryan Sayre 2E0RYS
• An Operator’s Guide to the Enigma Cipher Machine by Simon Singh
• Back to Basics Radio – build a self-powered solderless receiver by Iain Sharp
• InfraRed Communications by Michael Turner
• Surface Mount Soldering – SMD by hand isn’t hard, build your own Persistence of Vision kit to prove it! by Edinburgh Hacklab
Other talks https://www.emfcamp.org/talks/

Announcing TiLDA MKe, the incredible EMF 2014 camp badge
http://blog.emfcamp.org/post/94157161753/announcing-tilda-mke-the-incredible-emf-2014-camp

EMF 2014 https://www.emfcamp.org/
Twitter @emfcamp
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/emfcamp

Report on the EMF 2012 event https://amsat-uk.org/2012/09/01/emf-2012-milton-keynes/

ArduSat Open-Source Arduino-based Satellite

ArduSat is an open-source arduino-based CubeSat. It plans to have an extensive sensor-suite onboard that will allow users to upload their own code and run their own experiments.

Watch KickStarter ArduSat

Open Satellite Network https://sites.google.com/a/hackersinspace.net/www/

MURSAT1 – A (Hacker) Space Art Project

This video shows a presentation on the mur.sat TubeSat MURSAT1 that was given at the Chaos Computer Camp on August 13, 2011.

A team of about 15 people around mur.at (Graz/Austria) have build their first Nanosatellite called MURSAT1, based on the Interorbital Systems TubeSat and developed further following their research. In 2012 MURSAT1 should be launched into a 310 km orbit.

The amateur radio TubeSat carries a camera and a microphone.  The command and control uplink is in the 145.9 MHz band and the downlink in the 435 MHz band. Further info at mur.sat wiki https://wiki.mur.at/sat/

Watch mur.sat – A (Hacker) Space Art Project – CCCamp 2011

This talk gives an overview of the project and the technical hacking done so far.

The team say Mursat1 itself will become our performer, taking self portraits with a camera, transmitting data about his position relative to earth by torquers, receiving and translating particle detection and collision with a piezo microphone, sending compressed audiodata for radio transmission on earth, hosting children’s wishes to become a shooting star themselves, counting.

Speaker: Bernhard Tittelbach, Christian Pointner
EventID: 4575
Event: Chaos Communication Camp 2011 (CCCamp 2011) of the Chaos Computer Club [CCC]
Location: Luftfahrtmuseum Finowfurt, Museumstr. 1, 16244 Schorfheide near Berlin, Germany
Language: English
Start: 13.08.2011 19:30:00 +02:00

Hams Asked To Help Encourage Home Construction

Diane Bruce VA3DB

Diane Bruce VA3DB

The AMSAT News Service reports that Diane Bruce, VA3DB, is asking radio amateurs to help with a new website and mailing list devoted to home construction projects.

If you are currently a ham radio builder, or interested in becoming one, the Hamradio-builder mailing list has been created with you in mind.

Diane Bruce VA3DB says of the list, “A recent look at some old 73 Magazines brought to mind the simple projects this magazine produced. So my thought was to do something similar, but meant for the web instead of dead tree. I am not talking a full fledged magazine, but a website where we can put simple beginner type articles, with copious photos and good instructions. We hope it will become a bit like Maker Magazine but for the radio amateur.”

A few of us have written and edited amateur radio articles. She is proposing for the moment that we clean up or write a few articles suitable for beginners to start the content for this community.

List members have already proposed topics on homebrew test equipment, and antennas. Amateur radio satellite operators have skill and many ideas, construction projects, and techniques to get beginners on-the-air at VHF, UHF, and microwave frequencies.

The project is just getting started. If you are interested in joining this community you can sign up for the list at:

http://diana.db.net/mailman/listinfo/hamradio-builder

Watch the video – The DIY Magic of Amateur Radio http://www.uk.amsat.org/3158
A Hi-Res 480 MB version of the DIY Magic DVD can be downloaded from http://p1k.arrl.org/pub/pr/
73 Magazine PDF’s from 1960-2003 can be downloaded from http://tinyurl.com/73Magazine
Make Magazine article http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/05/collapsible-fabric-yagi-antenna.html

Electronic home construction (DIY) is undergoing a boom with Maker and Hacker groups springing up everywhere. Hackspaces are places where people meet up to carry out constructional projects, see http://hackspace.org.uk/