If you had money, what would your amateur adventure look like?

Foundations of Amateur Radio

A couple of weeks ago a friend, Ben VK6NCB asked an interesting question in our weekly net. He wanted to know, if money wasn't a concern, what would your ideal shack look like? The answers varied widely from leaving everything as is and using the money to retire, through to purpose built fixed or mobile shacks, with world wide DXCC activation travel and everything in between.

My own answer was a little different. I envisaged establishing an RF research laboratory and spending my life exploring and investigating the ins and outs of the fundamentals of our hobby. Building software defined radios and building tools to leverage their capabilities.

As far-fetched as money not being a concern might sound, it's something that a group of radio amateurs had to grapple with in 2019 when their group came into some money. The result is a private foundation with the aim to support, promote, and enhance amateur radio digital communications and broader communication.

The foundation, Amateur Radio Digital Communications or ARDC uses its resources to provide grants to the amateur community. There's a number of criteria to be eligible to receive an ARDC grant, but you must at least relate to the support and growth of amateur radio, education, research and development. Grants are evaluated on a range of aspirational goals, things like reach, inclusiveness, innovation, social good and others.

One of the first questions you might ask is how did these people get the money and why are they giving it away?

To answer that we'll need to travel back to 1981 when Hank, KA6M had the foresight to imagine that Internet-style networking was going to be a thing and requested a block of IP addresses for use by radio amateurs. If you're not familiar, an IP address is like a telephone number, but for a computer. Hank was granted a block of 16.7 million addresses. For decades these were informally administered by a group of volunteers working under the name of AMPRnet and later 44Net.

In 2011 the group founded ARDC as a California non-profit and officially took ownership of the network space and its management.

At this point I'll make a slight detour into IP addresses. I promise it's relevant.

For information to travel to a computer on the Internet it needs to have an address. That address, originally specified using a 32-bit number, a so-called IPv4 address, made it possible to uniquely identify around 4 billion computers. With the explosive growth of computing and the Internet, the world started running out of addresses and in 1998, IPv6 was proposed to solve the problem. It uses a 128-bit number and has space to uniquely identify something like 340 trillion computers.

In 2018, the ARDC was presented with a unique opportunity to sell some of its increasingly valuable address space, due to IPv4 address scarcity, but soon to be worthless, due to IPv6 adoption. After a year of internal discussion, in the middle of 2019, the decision was finalised and the ARDC sold a quarter of the address block that Hank had been granted back in 1981. On the 18th of July, 2019, Amazon Web Services became the proud new owner of just over 4 million new IP addresses.

I should point out that radio amateurs haven't ever used more than half of the original block and IPv6 is going to make this no longer any issue.

So, how much did they make from this adventure?

Well, each address sold for about $25, making for a lump sum of well over $100 million dollars which the ARDC used to establish its grants program. To round off the story, in 2020, the ARDC changed from a public charity to a private foundation and continues to administer the 44Net and the grants program.

Their grants list is impressive and inspirational, so check it out on the ampr.org website. While you're there, you can subscribe to the newsletter and read about some of the amazing work that's flowing from the ARDC as a result of its efforts.

At this point you might be getting all excited about applying for a grant and you should, but I'd like to ask a different question.

What have you done lately to grow our hobby, to stimulate it, to encourage new people, to innovate, research and learn? What has been your contribution?

So, if you had money, what would you do with your amateur adventure?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB