About Us
Ham Radio Village Inc
Ham Radio Village Inc is a registered Colorado nonprofit corporation serving the general public.
Our primary focus is delivering amateur radio related educational content, hands-on experiences, and license testing sessions online and in-person at information security conferences. We believe that the more people know about amateur radio, the more safe, secure, functional, and innovative our wireless products, services, and experiments will be.
Organization information
Our Federal EIN is 88-1612653.
We are currently applying for IRS 501(c)3 status.
Our Colorado ID# is 20221330644.
How did this get Started? Why Ham Radio at DEF CON®?
After several years of being involved running ham radio exams at DEF CON®, a common theme emerged: People were either wondering where to start, interested in learning more, or deciding what to do next. Other villages touched on related topics, but there wasn't anything specific for the growing ham community. Ham Radio is in may ways the original "hacker" culture and "maker" community, and it's a shame we don't better represent ourselves to the larger hacker community. Our goal is to fix that!
We were accepted as a new village to DEF CON 27 and though we were a small new village tucked away in the Flamingo, we had a great turnout, lots of interest, good content, and started building the foundation to be even better in the future.
In 2020, We returned as a "virtual" village for the online DEF CON event. This brought many challenges but also unlocked a lot of new opportunities, including the formation of our Discord server which is now a highly active gathering spot year-round. In 2021, we retained the virtual presence and once again returned to offing in-person activities and exams. We're excited to see a full return to DEF CON 30, and to expand our offering to other conference events!