Rachel Has Problems

I'm back from Herefordshire, and my first ever Electromagnetic Field. It was awesome!

I'll admit, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect before I arrived at EMF but I left feeling as if all my expectations had been exceeded. There was such a great atmosphere and loads of passionate people showing off their cool projects. Sometimes it was hard to choose which talks to go to, but I've been able to listen to some amazing stories and projects from a wide range of hobbies and engineering including Astrophotography, Programming, "Biohacking (iykyk)", Electronics and Networking. I found the event fascinating.

I find the idea of festivals somewhat overwhelming, I can be pretty uncomfortable around lots of people and lots of noise (in fact, the only other festival I've been to previously is CarFest) but I didn't get that feeling at EMF at all. What I did find, was that the event was super re-affirming. I wouldn't like to guess how much HRT was in those fields but it was nice to be surrounded with other people like me, and it was a nice feeling that I was also able to be myself without any fear of judgement. I did come across some issues, not to do with EMF at all, and more my mental state but that's the subject for another post.

We were lucky this year with the weather, I was expecting for half of the weekend to be a washout but in the end we had near wall to wall sunshine, surprisingly I didn't get sunburnt either. Sadly I didn't really get around to playing too much with this year's badge (the Tildagon) and didn't get around to taking part in GCHQ.NET as I was mostly attending the talks. As is the case with me I was also rather tired by 21:00 although I did have a walk around the site Saturday evening so I did get to see all the cool lasers!

I was lucky enough to get a ticket for building a satellite ground station. I've operated a VHF SATNOGS ground station for a couple of years now and always thought of creating a TinyGS station too, the workshop at EMF gave me the excuse to do it with other people which was nice (otherwise I probably would have done it on my own at home). Thanks to the Tog Hackerspace for organising this.

If I had to choose one thing that I didn't like, I'm sorry but it would have to be the Polybius Generators. Don't get me wrong, as far as I could tell for a capture the flag style game it did look fun and the execution of the idea was completed to a high standard, my gripe with these was the volume of the audio. They were a bit too loud. I was at the AMSAT village attending a talk on Ham Sat operations/history and someone behind us activated the generator just outside, because this person had scanned a card that hadn't been seen before the audio looped over and over and over until it timed out. Frustratingly during this time I was struggling to hear the speaker delivering the talk. That's my only gripe from the whole event, and it's me being picky.

So, would I go to EMF again? Hell yes! Bring on 2026! I doubt this post will get that much traction but if any of the speakers or event organisers see this, thank you! This was one of the best weekends I've had in a long long while.

(I'll try and get around to posting more photos over on my Pixelfed account. I'll toot this out when I do so on my Mastodon account.)