For the February 2026 meeting, Jef N5JEF will be talking about a couple of emerging, frontier technologies that will have wide applicability to our future, and a playground, sandbox, or experimental lab for hands-on exploration. These include Spread Spectrum (particularly LoRa) as an effective RF physical layer, and Mesh Network routing, which is an evolving framework for communication that is off-grid, decentralized, resilient, and low-power.

Why are these interesting?

Spread Spectrum modulation makes communication in our increasingly noisy RF environment more reliable, and Mesh Routing extends that communication capability far beyond the direct point-to-point radio horizon. Between the two we can expect longer communication range, with increased reliability.

In his day job, Jef is a senior analyst with the County of Placer Radio Services Group, focused on mission critical public safety and environmental utilities radio systems. The group develops and supports systems including the P25 trunking system for regional law enforcement and public service agencies. Before that, he was a technical and field service manager for over twenty years in scientific instruments for laboratory, industrial, and semiconductor metrology. He is also into emergency management, search and rescue, and personal preparedness, and is, he says, “a total science and technology nerd.”