On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 6:13 PM Joseph Armbruster < josepharmbruster@gmail.com> wrote:
One thing is quite obvious from all of this... Namely, I need to quit my job and come work with you all of you!
It's a volunteer project, and you are welcome to help, as are all AMSAT members and all Radio Amateurs,* regardless of where they live. *Because of that ITAR stuff we worked out.
All but one of the present ARDC board of directors that I know of are AMSAT members of very high stature and long standing. Bob McGwier who was AMSAT CTO and board member. Phil Karn has done a lot of the digital innovation of AMSAT and we recently saw his work on a radio buoy, Bdale Garbee did a lot of work on P3D, including a GPS that was meant to operate above the GPS constellation. Brian Kantor recently passed away, and deserves a lot of the thanks for all of this, and I don't know if he was a satellite op, but he was definitely a digital ham.
Long, long ago, Brian and Phil Karn and others of the digital amateur radio pioneers set up an IP network for Amateur Radio. Because nobody took the Internet seriously, we were granted a class-A network for Amateur Radio, with 16,777,216 addresses just in our part. This was "net 44", because the addresses were of the form 44.0.0.0 . It was also called AMPR.org for the DNS system. I operated a station in this network using the KA9Q software and a Kantronics TNC.
In the present time, people have grown to take the Internet a lot more seriously, and the world ran out of IPV4 addresses in their 32-bit space. We now have IPV6, which has a much larger address space, but IPV4 is still important. So, Brian and friends sold 3/4 of our addresses to Amazon for a lot of money, and formed a non-profit to manage it. We still have more than enough IPV4 addresses for ham radio, and the fact is that most new work would be on IPV6. Entertainingly, my Amazon Lightsail server is on net 44 now.
Thanks
Bruce