HRN 431: Grant... Wished (plus 'Biggest FCC Fine' and VHF Contest)
/This is a jam packed show.
First, we talk with John Hays K7VE. John is Outreach Manager with the Amateur Radio Digital Communications Foundation. For the past three years, this group has made grants totaling millions of dollars to Amateur Radio groups and projects… and they’re just getting started. Find out where they got the money and how they give it away (maybe to your club?). John also talks about the state and future of Digital communications in Amateur Radio.
Next, we take up the case of Jason Frawley WA7CQ. The FCC has proposed fining Jason a record $34,000 for interfering with government communications involving a forest fire near his Idaho hometown (and a tower where he has communications equipment) last summer. But this is not an allegation of jamming, a false emergency call or misdirection of emergency personnel. Jason says he had a good reason to use the Forest Service frequency to alert the firefighters about something he knew… something the FCC did not detail in their Notice of Apparent Liability that proposes the fine. There are lots of question marks that will hopefully be filled in over the coming months. We have a spirited discussion.
Finally, this was the June VHF Contest weekend. Gary drove the Q-mobile up to a ‘high spot’ in his neighborhood and made a few contacts on two-meter SSB and FM, and then six-meter SSB. He made a little movie out of the experience. And Gary’s wife Cyndi KD4ACW makes a return appearance to the show because the VHF Contest has special significance to her and Gary’s relationship. Yes… VHF ‘Roving’ was their first date 💘
LINKS:
So, we didn’t give away where the ARDC grant money came from, did we? Well, it wasn’t a billionaire ham (are there any? (Elon, got your ham ticket? Why not? Bill? Jeff?). There was… is… a resource that ham radio received a few decades ago that we haven’t used much of. It’s gotten scarce, so it’s gotten valuable. We’re not talking spectrum. We’re talking IPv4 Internet addresses. And in this case, Use It or Lose It was more like Use It or Sell Some of What You Haven’t Used for a Bundle of Cash. The 44 Net. Ham Radio got millions of those addresses back when nobody thought the Internet would get that big, and the total number of addresses was over 4 Billion. Well, it did, and ‘the Internet’ ran out of new IPv4 addresses. They invented IPv6, which has enough addresses for every grain of sand on the beach (340 trillion trillion trillion). But the Internet is still based on IPv4, and not all devices can handle IPv6, so those ‘old’ addresses are valuable. And ARDC sold just some of their stash for millions 💰, which they’re giving to worthy causes in Amateur Radio.
But ARDC still has millions more of these IPv4 addressed, dedicated to Amateur Radio. and they’d really like to get more into use. Got an idea? Take the Survey. Let’em know.
