July 11 Notice of Ex Parte Meeting
I like this summary. It's inline with what I have been saying for some time.
The fundamental purpose of the amateur service is to encourage experimentation with radio technologies of all kinds “to contribute to the advancement of the radio art”, to encourage “advancing skills in both communication and the technical phases of the art”, and most importantly, to “expand the existing reservoir within the amateur radio service of trained operators, technicians, and electronics experts”.1 Unfortunately, significant aspects of the Part 97 amateur rules no longer provide the basis and flexibility needed to foster experimentation with some of the leading modern techniques. The rules need updating to delete unnecessary provisions and outdated restrictions that impair the core purpose of the service. In short, aspects of the rules constitute an impediment to amateur efforts to attract and teach the next generation of American youth that we rely upon to enhance America’s global competitiveness by continuing America’s leadership in wireless communications technologies.
Now if the league would share what their next move is, I'd likely rejoin. Getting up in the FCC's face once a decade isn't really enough to impress me.
One other thing that remains to be seen is if the ARDC/amprnet POP's will lead to anything productive in terms of new protocols, internal network developments etc. I have this funny feeling it's going to be more of an administrative burden than the latter. For starters there its taking an unsually long time to publicly launch. I mean when it was a one man show, Brian Kantor pulled things off in an impressive turn around time while still working. A plug and play VPN has its place, like for repeater sites, espically as IPv4 addresses shrink and global NAT becomes a headache for ham radio connected applications. But there will also be a subset of people trying to use it from home. And there as of the momement is no real reason for that type of use. So I am concerned it will be used nefariously in those cases. If the internal/intranet aspects of 44net are developed then home use makes sense. I personally like a trust network of sorts where there is an educational barrier to keep out the clueless ones. Besides ham radio should be about learning. How on god's greeen earth is anyone who cannot figure out how to connect to the network right now using IPencap going to ever make any meaningful contribution to the network?
Maybe the ARDC should develop some furthering education classes? People like awards in the contesting area, and the FCC license in reality isn't very technical. We clearly need more technical people in the hobby to help move things forward.
The development of the ARDC foundation and grant giving is the right idea. But in my opinion it sadly hasn't yet managed to put any new technology in the hands of many to truely change ham radio for the better. If they or some other organization could achive something simular to what the Raspberry Pi foundation, I would be thoroughly impressed. How in the heck does ham radio get things manufactured?
In summary the two biggest issues I see for ham radio (with a USA bias) is getting outdated rules changed and getting new technology manufactured. A good start to the latter would be first to identify what we need, i.e. that technology task force idea that I have mentioned before.
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