Steve, Really enjoyed this week's edition. I didn't even get through the whole thing just yet. The ideas that you propose here are really just terrific. I wish that I knew how to better assist in getting the ball rolling for such an AMSATish project or how to contribute in some way monetarily or otherwise. Thanks for putting these out week after week. This has me excited, do you have any suggestions on how we form some standards body and how to get buy in?
John - Thanks - I enjoyed writing it for the Zero Retries audience.
I'm optimistic that there will be some "AMSATish project" in 2023 to make something like AmGEO-200 a reality in this decade. As soon as I see something, or hear something, you'll read about it in Zero Retries. Even given its significant head start with the involvement of Dr. Bob McGwier N4HY, getting such a thing into GEO (and keeping it operating) is going to be a heavy lift. It will require a LOT of people stepping up for labor of all kinds, especially evangelism and financial contributions.
Some of those items are so close to being reality that I felt like I was writing a press release for an unannounced product or a company / organization in stealth mode.
Lovely vision. I would love to see it turn out this way, or at least along these lines. Inspiring stuff.
One note on comments: I admit I tend to buffer my 0retries emails and read them all in a go after as long as a month--mostly because they deserve more attention than I typically give when triaging my email. I may not be the only one who comes late to the conversation sometimes.
Yeah, as much as I drink from many firehoses in gathering background for Zero Retries, I completely understand that the "firehose effect" applies to many Zero Retries subscribers. Over the 18 month life of Zero Retries, I've had several subscribers comment that they had no idea about some of the Zero Retries Interesting projects I report out on in Zero Retries every week.
As for commenting, have no fear. If an issue of Zero Retries garners at least one comment, then the "latest five issues are open for comments" guideline applies. One enthusiastic reader started at ZR 0000 and commented on almost every issue, and that seemed a disservice to him and the readers since that info had aged out a bit. Thus I decided on the "latest five issues are open for comments" approach. But if an issue of ZR garners no comments within a week (which is common), then that content (apparently) wasn't that interesting to most, and thus there seems little point in keeping the comments open for that issue.
Steve: wow just wow! Thanks for a thrilling treatise on a possible future for our fantastic hobby. I remember learning about TCP/IP on my own at night playing with packet radio, and blowing people’s mind at the engineering company I worked. They didn’t think ham radio was doing that kind of thing. I hope your article stirs up some interest in our hobby. I’ll promote it as much as I can. By the way, great to see you have joined Mastodon. In many ways, it reminds me of when hypertext first made its way onto the Internet! 73 Rich N5CSU
I had a very similar experience in my career. I was able to transition from Electronic Technician to SysAdmin in part because I knew a reasonable amount about TCP/IP - mostly from Amateur Radio.
ZR 0079 isn't quite to 1000 "Total Views" (Substack's term), but it may well hit that threshold by ZR 0080 - the most of any ZR issue to date.
Yeah, Mastadon is fun and in 2023 I'll be putting most of Zero Retries' social media efforts there.
I enjoyed the idea of federated authentication, maybe some kind of fediverse for RF? I think hams abhor the idea of centralized command and control (at least applied to them) but would love a way to mute the bad actors that pop up in our amateur radio community.
Tom - we in Amateur Radio didn't use it much (I did hear of a few back in the day), but UUCP, usenet, Fidonet, and even PBBS' that participated in forwarding were all "federated" back before that term was invented or popularized. Check out the video in Zero Retries 0080 on Friday - the NCPACKET folks are doing "federation" now, at least for realtime chatting.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, "centralized command and control" is already a fact on certain DMR linked repeaters. If you find yourself with a difference of opinion with the leadership (ownership) of one of those networks, your DMR ID can simply be locked out of the system. Kind of like the old packet radio LCALL, but network-wide rather than just your individual TNC. Push your PTT button as often as you want - on those networks you don't exist.
Interesting vision, Steve, and certainly more imagination than I have!
To me the most two compelling projects from your vision would be AmGeo200 and ARSO.
Regarding ARSO, as I see it, there is a large gulf between an organization that develops and sets standards that all compliant systems must adhere to and a curator of current practices. Your description seems to align more closely with the latter even though the name implies something along the lines of ISO. I think we're in a agreement that we don't want to stifle innovation in amateur radio techniques by having any sort of rigid "Thou shall" beyond the ITU and FCC rules. However, a central clearing house that makes it easy to identify and find protocols and submit new ones would be valuable.
Amateur radio has always had a certain amount of free spirited culture which is the catalyst for new ideas and likely a good amount of dysfunction!
Nate - My vision for ARSO was in large part a clearinghouse for existing standards. But I forsee a need for creating new standards, or insuring interoperability between existing standards. For example, I mentioned:
ARSO developed a simple identifier that could be transmitted with most digital modes, allowing very easy lookup of the technology used for every transmission.
That's an example where something like ARSO would be very useful.
Another example would be who "arbitrates" the header structure of two different digital voice modes when you want them to interoperate? You change YOUR header to be compatible with ours! No, YOU change your header to be compatible with OURS! Etc.
There are just so MANY Amateur Radio "standards" out there and we're innovating so fast now that the time seems ripe to bring them together into one "organization", in part to make it easy to find them. I saw examples of that issue during my time in ARDC, where grant proposals sought funding to "reinvent the wheel" and create a new standard, mostly because they had no idea that a similar, possibly usable standard already existed.
It will take someone with more stamina and resources than I to herd those various cats.
Steve, Really enjoyed this week's edition. I didn't even get through the whole thing just yet. The ideas that you propose here are really just terrific. I wish that I knew how to better assist in getting the ball rolling for such an AMSATish project or how to contribute in some way monetarily or otherwise. Thanks for putting these out week after week. This has me excited, do you have any suggestions on how we form some standards body and how to get buy in?
John - Thanks - I enjoyed writing it for the Zero Retries audience.
I'm optimistic that there will be some "AMSATish project" in 2023 to make something like AmGEO-200 a reality in this decade. As soon as I see something, or hear something, you'll read about it in Zero Retries. Even given its significant head start with the involvement of Dr. Bob McGwier N4HY, getting such a thing into GEO (and keeping it operating) is going to be a heavy lift. It will require a LOT of people stepping up for labor of all kinds, especially evangelism and financial contributions.
Excellent article this week Steve! So many of the ideas are very close to reality now.
Brian - Thanks!
Some of those items are so close to being reality that I felt like I was writing a press release for an unannounced product or a company / organization in stealth mode.
Lovely vision. I would love to see it turn out this way, or at least along these lines. Inspiring stuff.
One note on comments: I admit I tend to buffer my 0retries emails and read them all in a go after as long as a month--mostly because they deserve more attention than I typically give when triaging my email. I may not be the only one who comes late to the conversation sometimes.
Ben - Thanks!
Yeah, as much as I drink from many firehoses in gathering background for Zero Retries, I completely understand that the "firehose effect" applies to many Zero Retries subscribers. Over the 18 month life of Zero Retries, I've had several subscribers comment that they had no idea about some of the Zero Retries Interesting projects I report out on in Zero Retries every week.
As for commenting, have no fear. If an issue of Zero Retries garners at least one comment, then the "latest five issues are open for comments" guideline applies. One enthusiastic reader started at ZR 0000 and commented on almost every issue, and that seemed a disservice to him and the readers since that info had aged out a bit. Thus I decided on the "latest five issues are open for comments" approach. But if an issue of ZR garners no comments within a week (which is common), then that content (apparently) wasn't that interesting to most, and thus there seems little point in keeping the comments open for that issue.
Steve: wow just wow! Thanks for a thrilling treatise on a possible future for our fantastic hobby. I remember learning about TCP/IP on my own at night playing with packet radio, and blowing people’s mind at the engineering company I worked. They didn’t think ham radio was doing that kind of thing. I hope your article stirs up some interest in our hobby. I’ll promote it as much as I can. By the way, great to see you have joined Mastodon. In many ways, it reminds me of when hypertext first made its way onto the Internet! 73 Rich N5CSU
Rich - Thanks for the kind words about ZR 0079!
I had a very similar experience in my career. I was able to transition from Electronic Technician to SysAdmin in part because I knew a reasonable amount about TCP/IP - mostly from Amateur Radio.
ZR 0079 isn't quite to 1000 "Total Views" (Substack's term), but it may well hit that threshold by ZR 0080 - the most of any ZR issue to date.
Yeah, Mastadon is fun and in 2023 I'll be putting most of Zero Retries' social media efforts there.
I enjoyed the idea of federated authentication, maybe some kind of fediverse for RF? I think hams abhor the idea of centralized command and control (at least applied to them) but would love a way to mute the bad actors that pop up in our amateur radio community.
Tom - we in Amateur Radio didn't use it much (I did hear of a few back in the day), but UUCP, usenet, Fidonet, and even PBBS' that participated in forwarding were all "federated" back before that term was invented or popularized. Check out the video in Zero Retries 0080 on Friday - the NCPACKET folks are doing "federation" now, at least for realtime chatting.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, "centralized command and control" is already a fact on certain DMR linked repeaters. If you find yourself with a difference of opinion with the leadership (ownership) of one of those networks, your DMR ID can simply be locked out of the system. Kind of like the old packet radio LCALL, but network-wide rather than just your individual TNC. Push your PTT button as often as you want - on those networks you don't exist.
Interesting vision, Steve, and certainly more imagination than I have!
To me the most two compelling projects from your vision would be AmGeo200 and ARSO.
Regarding ARSO, as I see it, there is a large gulf between an organization that develops and sets standards that all compliant systems must adhere to and a curator of current practices. Your description seems to align more closely with the latter even though the name implies something along the lines of ISO. I think we're in a agreement that we don't want to stifle innovation in amateur radio techniques by having any sort of rigid "Thou shall" beyond the ITU and FCC rules. However, a central clearing house that makes it easy to identify and find protocols and submit new ones would be valuable.
Amateur radio has always had a certain amount of free spirited culture which is the catalyst for new ideas and likely a good amount of dysfunction!
Nate - My vision for ARSO was in large part a clearinghouse for existing standards. But I forsee a need for creating new standards, or insuring interoperability between existing standards. For example, I mentioned:
ARSO developed a simple identifier that could be transmitted with most digital modes, allowing very easy lookup of the technology used for every transmission.
That's an example where something like ARSO would be very useful.
Another example would be who "arbitrates" the header structure of two different digital voice modes when you want them to interoperate? You change YOUR header to be compatible with ours! No, YOU change your header to be compatible with OURS! Etc.
There are just so MANY Amateur Radio "standards" out there and we're innovating so fast now that the time seems ripe to bring them together into one "organization", in part to make it easy to find them. I saw examples of that issue during my time in ARDC, where grant proposals sought funding to "reinvent the wheel" and create a new standard, mostly because they had no idea that a similar, possibly usable standard already existed.
It will take someone with more stamina and resources than I to herd those various cats.