As some of you may be aware, last weekend I went to Guildford to attend this year’s EMF camp. Electromagnetic Field is a camping festival geared towards hackers and makers. The weekend is filled with interesting talks, demonstrations and crazy projects.

Arriving on Camp

My idea of a camping trip!

I arrived on site with a reasonable idea of what to expect, but this was reinforced when someone whizzed past me in a Sinclair C5. This turned out to be only a taster of what was to come.

I was to be joining a group of amateur radio enthusiasts who were running the EMF hams village. There were 16 of us and we had all come with a variety of equipment. Using the special event callsign GB4EMF, we operated using the following stations:

• HF Station – Yaesu FT-1000, Mosley Mini-33-aw beam, SCAM-12 mast
• VHF/UHF Station – Icom 706, 2/70 Beam, telescopic mast
• Satellite Station – Yaesu FT-847, 2 & 70 ZL Specials on G-5500 Az/El rotator, tripod
• Local Comms – Crossband repeater, Yaesu FT8900, X-50, 5.4m Clansman mast

This was all made easier by the network of datenklos (data-toilets). These were power and networks hubs being kept dry using porta-loos. Over the weekend we maxed out at over 100kW pulled off two generators, 66  Wi-Fi access points, 4500 networked devices and 3.5TB of data going between our network and the internet.

Things to see

There was a lot of ‘stuff’ at EMF this year. A few honourable mentions go to the high altitude ballooning village, fire pong, just add sharks laser cutters, blacksmithing tent, lockpicking tent giant guitar hero, the music powered quadruple flamethrower, retro arcade tent and the amateur radio village of course.

JustAddSharks Laser Cutter

HABville’s weather balloon tracking station

Pub sign!

Overall EMF camp this year was a fantastic event, full of technology and ideas. The talks I attended were very interesting, and all available of the EMF Youtube account. I’m definitely signing up for the event when it next runs in 2018. For more info see emfcamp.org, wiki.emfcamp.org, and for more photos see https://www.flickr.com/groups/emfcamp/pool/.

View of site

PS: I’ve got my new callsign, 2E0UAR

-Peter Barnes (M6KVA, 2E0UAR)