Paul Tagliamonte: 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 truely 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!