POSTBAG

The Amateur Radio devroom at FOSDEM 2027 brings together the people who write, use and take apart free and open-source radio software and hardware: SDR developers, radio amateurs and satellite experimenters. If you have built, measured or reverse engineered something that involves radio waves, we want to hear about it.

Amateur Radio (ham radio) is a radio service defined in international regulations, and a worldwide community that has been experimenting in the open for over a century. It combines electronics, software, propagation and human contact, and it remains one of the few frameworks in which individuals can design, build and operate their own transmitters.

Satellite links are no longer the preserve of agencies and operators. With commodity SDR hardware and free software, anyone can capture, dissect and understand what LEO constellations and geostationary payloads are transmitting, and put those signals to uses their designers never had in mind. We want talks that open the black box: how the waveform works, how you figured it out, and what you built with it.

Topics:

• New developments in amateur radio modes
• Software tooling for amateur radio operators
• Free and open radio hardware
• Satellite communication systems: open-source modems, waveforms and protocol stacks, ground station software and networks
• LEO constellations seen from the ground: signal capture, analysis and reverse engineering of downlinks
• Signals of opportunity: using satellite signals for things they were never designed for (positioning and timing, passive radar, reflectometry, ionospheric and propagation sensing)
• Creative reuse of space and ground infrastructure: amateur transponders, repurposed consumer terminals and dishes, low-cost receive chains
• VLF systems, radio astronomy, propagation monitoring
• Entertaining wireless hacks

How to submit ?

Submit your proposal at https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2027/cfp: choose “Submit a proposal” and select the Amateur-Radio track.

• Submission deadline: 23/11/2026
• Notification of acceptance: 01/12/2026 – Schedule published one week later
• Devroom date: Sunday 31/01/2027 morning, Brussels
• Short talk: 25 minutes slot, including 5 minutes of Q&A

What we are looking for:

This is a technical community conference. We want to see how your project works, what was hard and what you learned. Live demos and prototypes are very welcome alongside slides. Marketing-style presentations will not be accepted, and talks must relate to free and open-source software or open hardware.

All talks are recorded and streamed live. By submitting, you agree to your talk being published under the same licence as all FOSDEM content (CC BY).

The final schedule will be published on the FOSDEM website. All times are Brussels local time (CET, UTC+1).

Contact & Questions:

opensource@iaru-r1.org

• Bastien ON4BCY
• Marc HB9SSB, IARU Region 1 Open Source Projects Coordinator
• Sylvain F4GKR