Puget Sound Repeater Group

Updated: The next PSRG Educational Meeting is scheduled for Saturday, January 9, 2021 at 1:30 PM. The meeting will be on Zoom.

This should be fascinating! The speaker will be Vikram Iyer, a final year PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington. Vikram builds end-to-end wireless systems that push the boundaries of what is possible with particular focus on power, size, and weight. Enabling mobility for small wireless devices is challenging, but this is an area where nature excels. While man-made robots at these sizes are fundamentally limited by battery energy density, small insects like bees can fly for hours. This talk presents his recent work on bio-integrative systems that seek to piggyback on the capabilities of live insects for mobility. This includes Living IoT, a first of its kind platform to include sensing, computation, backscatter communication, and localization in a package small enough to fly on the back of a live bumblebee. He will also discuss how we (meaning people smarter than the average ham) can design more complex sensing systems like wireless cameras that are still small enough to be carried by a live beetle, and how these technologies can be adapted to track invasive “murder” hornets.

Vikram has worked closely with the Washington Department of Agriculture to help track and eradicate Asian giant hornets. Vikram’s work has been recognized by a Microsoft Research Fellowship, best paper awards, and a Marconi Society Young Scholar award.

This meeting was recording and can be viewed here: January 2021 Educational Meeting.

The November PSRG Educational Meeting, Repeaters, WWARA and the Future was recorded and is now available: November 2020 Educational Meeting.

The amateur repeater landscape is currently undergoing a significant change and it has been happening for the last 10 years. The WWARA is the repeater coordination body for western Washington and has identified trends, which mirror what happened in the commercial space, with a slow transition from traditional ‘wide band’ analog FM repeaters to digital and narrow band repeaters. This talk will provide some background on the how and why repeater coordination happens, the role the WWARA plays and provide some insight into the coming narrowband transition. The goal is to educate the repeater users and owners in western Washington and collect some feedback on how hams would like to shape this transition.

The speaker was Kenny Richards, KU7M. Kenny is the Secretary of WWARA, the frequency coordination body for Western Washington.