2024-07-12 — Year Four of Zero Retries Begins with 1900+ Subscribers, What’s New at DLARC - July 2024, Bits Oughta Be Just Bits, Zero Retries Guide to Zero Retries Interesting Small Vendors
"Not Much Zero Retries Interesting Reported from HAM RADIO 2024"
Interesting to me, anyway: Rob Robinett presented at the SDR Academy about the wsprdaemon receiver network, and the WSPRSONDE transmitters which are generating massive amounts of propagation data, and about some of the analysis that is being done with this data. This was an expansion of the presentations that he and I made at the recent Dayton Hamvention. Afterwards, Rob and I (in absentia) were given the "Ulrich L. Rohde Award" (one of four given) : Rob Robinett, AI6VN, with Paul Elliott, WB6CXC, for their fundamental work and influence on scientific research in other areas.
There are many others who have made important contributions to this ionospheric propagation research, but Rob and I had put together this particular presentation.
Paul - Literally this is the first bit of Zero Retries Interesting news that I've heard from HAM Radio 2024 (other than the previously mentioned SDR workshop). Congratulations to you and Rob and the other winners of the Rhode award!
I’m a subscriber from New Hampshire. Even though my reverse DNS is NH, I am sometimes geolocated to Western Massachusetts (100 miles away). 73 de W1WRA FN42fx
William - Thanks for letting me know that NH isn't truly void of Zero Retries subscribers. I tried to posit that I don't really believe Substacks's subscriber location "data" (at best, it's a guess), but it WAS humorous which is the spin I tried to impart. I've heard from several other Zero Retries readers in NH that wanted to be "counted" for their beloved state. Curiously, Zero Retries readers in the other "absentee" states that were named have not similarly chimed in to defend their states.
Resurrecting Technical Ideas from the Past: There are many gems buried in mountains of paper! Some electronic archives like the QST archive of the ARRL based on single articles, make it very difficult to dig them out.
One example: I got several bound volumes of QST from the 1930s and 1940s. By browsing I found the "I.A.R.U. News" and "Foreign News" columns. They answered questions that could not be answered by the German narrative about the start of ham radio in Germany after WW2. The very early start of ham radio was not enabled by a small group of enthusiasts as one of these illegal stations (I.A.R.U. definition), the later DL1CU, made us believe.
The start was that the US military government wanted a legal basis for emergency traffic by GIs with US ham radio licenses. So the first German ham radio law was issued by the "Wirtschaftsrat", a German body under supervision of the allies, a few months before the Federal Republic of Germany was founded.
A primary task of the Wirtschaftsrat was for example to bring the German population through the famine winter 1946/47, not the wishes of a few 100 Germans with an illegal hobby.
Alexander - Thanks for yet another example of the value of making archival material widely available online. One of the best sources of US Amateur Radio regulatory information was the W5YI Report. A paper archive of those has been located and is being scanned and brought online within DLARC.
_NO_ ONE ELSE CARED TO EVEN ATTEMPT SUCH A THING - UNTIL DLARC!
There is similar "alternative historical information" to be gleaned from a careful study of the W5YI Report that are at odds with the narrative from the ARRL about the history of various regulatory issues involving Amateur Radio. I think that history will be very valuable in future regulatory reforms for US Amateur Radio that will be attempted in this decade.
Don't write off coax for Internet service delivery! Comcast actually has a fiber competitive product with their Remote PHY device (RPD) node and passive coax. Remote PHY is pretty much a wide band SDR based on massive FPGAs and wide bandwidth DACs. The RPD takes a 10Gbps signal from the hub site and converts it into a 1.2 GHz wide complex RF waveform that creates OFDM, QAM and legacy signals for customer devices. It's pretty cool stuff. Not only that but borrowing CDMA tech from the cellular industry can offer symmetrical bandwidth up to and beyond 1 Gbps to the home over coax. This will likely be the last "upgrade" for the coaxial network but it can be done with a significant cost savings over having to run fiber to every potential customer.
That said, Comcast is taking an extremely long time rolling out the updates. At the rate they're going it will take decades. They're prioritizing areas with high population density or areas with lots of competition to make the numbers look good, which doesn't bode well for those of us who don't have other choices. And because Comcast wants to maintain uniform marketing across the company the expanded features and potential won't be realized until some threshold of homes passed is reached. Shame that. The Innovator's Dilemma seems to be a recurring theme in technology...
Speaking of innovation, I picked up a Kenwood TH-D75 a few weeks back. I sold a few older HTs that made the price basically a wash and combined a few radios into one. Pairing it with my phone changes APRS, finally there's a proper keyboard and display for sending short messages. But I still see the same weather stations, iGates and mobile beacons. Not much else going on. I also dusted off a TM-D700 that was down in the catacombs and got it connected to my home network using a serial-to-Ethernet adapter. Using a macOS program called QTH I get the same chat capabilities and excellent maps too. This has inspired me to start pushing some of my fellow hams in the area to start using APRS with their phones and add them to the home network too. Seems like we could have a really nice general purpose announcement and chat system in the local area (actually the digipeaters cover several hundred square miles across western Colorado and Utah, so not that "local") with very little hardware investment. Heck, I might try my hand at building a Raspbian image with DIrewolf configured to use a CM108 and Baofeng radio for a Zero W to hand out and make it even simpler. Not everyone likes yakking on the repeater all afternoon, but would like to know that 15 meters is open or that someone's going to lunch. I know most of the communications at workplaces are now on chat apps, no reason why that can't happen on APRS with better user software.
Ready - I'm not railing at the Hybrid Fiber / Coax architecture of Comcast quite so much as I am railing against the sad state of 20 or 30 or even 50 year old coaxial cable run underground or swinging in the wind from poles as the infrastructure for household broadband connectivity. It's old, tired, dumb. AT&T tried to do the same thing with their Hybrid Fiber / Copper in some of their service areas and that was even worse. Both Comcast and AT&T invested SO much in these schemes to avoid doing Fiber To The Premises that in the end, FTTP was actually cheaper, and still they won't do it because they can find enough customers that will put up with the flawed delivery systems because they simply don't know that there are alternatives. It's kind of the same story with "Household Broadband Service" from the wireless companies selling a little puck that supposedly can provide household broadband. It doesn't because the cellular infrastructure is designed for phones, not broadband streaming. The cellular companies could easily provide a competitive broadband experience with the excess capacity of their 5G upgrades... but they don't want to do the needed step of installing a fixed, directional antenna pointed at the cell tower for adequate signal. That would put the cellular companies in the consumer infrastructure business, which they're loathe to do.
Kudos that you're getting up to speed on APRS. There's a wealth of such largely unused capabilities in APRS. APRS creator Bob Burning KB4APR continually tried to explain that, but he went largely unheard. Folks are largely content to look at maps with moving cars. I *hope* *Hope* *HOPE* that the APRS Foundation actually puts themselves into a position that they can start evangelizing and explaining this stuff in a broader perspective than "The Cult of WB4APR" was able to do.
If (and I emphasize "if") the coax was installed properly and not damaged over the years it will continue to perform. But 'nuff about that.
I remember WB4APR's promotion of APRS at the DCC, often rather loudly while someone was giving a presentation hi hi. For sure the protocol was ahead of the hardware of the time, with limited keypad text entry and small displays it wasn't very practical... and that's with a TNC in the radio. I can't imagine trying to send a beacon with a DTMF keypad. One of the reasons for Meshtastic's recent success is the "smartphone peripheral" design and app user interface, something that I think should be copied for APRS use. Which gets the wheels turning. Most everything is there except for a really modern app. I know that APRSDroid is no longer under development, and most of the iOS apps are set up for connecting via APRS-IS first. Heck the Meshtastic app will send notifications to my watch!
It's great that we have the APRI-IS and aprs.fi in place, but I think the average ham sees them and figures that's what APRS is. I noticed POTA activations and special events posted only on APRS-IS, not sent over RF at all. I'm sure the POTA web admins aren't intentionally ignoring the RF network , just that the gateways aren't going to pass traffic from the Internet no matter what (even though I know the APRS-IS can be filtered by geographic boundary). And I wonder how often packets just get pulled into a gateway and done? The fatal error of the APRS-IS is that it Hoovers up the whole planet. Most of us don't care about the whole world, only our little place of interest. Maybe there's a use case for speciality -IS servers that only pass whatever is of interest, or regional passthrough. You'd have to send a "join" packet, much like the ANSRVR relay service or something. Might not even generate that much new RF traffic either, if done in a multicast sort of way.
Ready - Agreed, but lifetime of coax (as opposed to hardline) is measured in years, not decades, especially overhead, subject to wind, rain, physical abuse (poles being hit, etc.)
All of those issues are known, and I wish the APRS Foundation (https://www.aprsfoundation.org) would cease their navel-gazing and start weighing in about fundamental issues in the APRS ecosystem exactly like what you're describing. I just don't understand why APRSF isn't visibly DOING anything and engaging the APRS community at large (at least, no engagement that I'm aware of). APRS Foundation is spending down their goodwill rapidly having been formed two years ago and having done nothing of substance (again, in public, that I'm aware of... and I LOOK for such activity).
Steve, it is always a pleasure to crack open Zero Retries. I look forward to it every week, knowing you are going to have great content that stretches my thinking. I appreciate your work very much. The icing on this cake was to discover your very gracious recommendation of the Random Wire newsletter. Thank you! Looking forward to that cup of coffee! ...Tom KJ7T
Tom - Similarly, it's aways a pleasure to find The Random Wire in MY email inbox and thus look forward to several good readings to absorb all the hard won wisdom that you share. I am *NOT* exaggerating in saying that if there was more material out there with the quality and depth that you bring to bear with TRW, I may not have felt such an unmet need for Zero Retries. Zero Retries didn't get to where it is without lots of generous mentions along the way, and thus I am powerfully motivated to "Pay It Forward" when I see someone like you doing such a good job.
"Not Much Zero Retries Interesting Reported from HAM RADIO 2024"
Interesting to me, anyway: Rob Robinett presented at the SDR Academy about the wsprdaemon receiver network, and the WSPRSONDE transmitters which are generating massive amounts of propagation data, and about some of the analysis that is being done with this data. This was an expansion of the presentations that he and I made at the recent Dayton Hamvention. Afterwards, Rob and I (in absentia) were given the "Ulrich L. Rohde Award" (one of four given) : Rob Robinett, AI6VN, with Paul Elliott, WB6CXC, for their fundamental work and influence on scientific research in other areas.
There are many others who have made important contributions to this ionospheric propagation research, but Rob and I had put together this particular presentation.
Paul - Literally this is the first bit of Zero Retries Interesting news that I've heard from HAM Radio 2024 (other than the previously mentioned SDR workshop). Congratulations to you and Rob and the other winners of the Rhode award!
I’m a subscriber from New Hampshire. Even though my reverse DNS is NH, I am sometimes geolocated to Western Massachusetts (100 miles away). 73 de W1WRA FN42fx
William - Thanks for letting me know that NH isn't truly void of Zero Retries subscribers. I tried to posit that I don't really believe Substacks's subscriber location "data" (at best, it's a guess), but it WAS humorous which is the spin I tried to impart. I've heard from several other Zero Retries readers in NH that wanted to be "counted" for their beloved state. Curiously, Zero Retries readers in the other "absentee" states that were named have not similarly chimed in to defend their states.
Resurrecting Technical Ideas from the Past: There are many gems buried in mountains of paper! Some electronic archives like the QST archive of the ARRL based on single articles, make it very difficult to dig them out.
One example: I got several bound volumes of QST from the 1930s and 1940s. By browsing I found the "I.A.R.U. News" and "Foreign News" columns. They answered questions that could not be answered by the German narrative about the start of ham radio in Germany after WW2. The very early start of ham radio was not enabled by a small group of enthusiasts as one of these illegal stations (I.A.R.U. definition), the later DL1CU, made us believe.
The start was that the US military government wanted a legal basis for emergency traffic by GIs with US ham radio licenses. So the first German ham radio law was issued by the "Wirtschaftsrat", a German body under supervision of the allies, a few months before the Federal Republic of Germany was founded.
A primary task of the Wirtschaftsrat was for example to bring the German population through the famine winter 1946/47, not the wishes of a few 100 Germans with an illegal hobby.
Alexander - Thanks for yet another example of the value of making archival material widely available online. One of the best sources of US Amateur Radio regulatory information was the W5YI Report. A paper archive of those has been located and is being scanned and brought online within DLARC.
_NO_ ONE ELSE CARED TO EVEN ATTEMPT SUCH A THING - UNTIL DLARC!
There is similar "alternative historical information" to be gleaned from a careful study of the W5YI Report that are at odds with the narrative from the ARRL about the history of various regulatory issues involving Amateur Radio. I think that history will be very valuable in future regulatory reforms for US Amateur Radio that will be attempted in this decade.
Don't write off coax for Internet service delivery! Comcast actually has a fiber competitive product with their Remote PHY device (RPD) node and passive coax. Remote PHY is pretty much a wide band SDR based on massive FPGAs and wide bandwidth DACs. The RPD takes a 10Gbps signal from the hub site and converts it into a 1.2 GHz wide complex RF waveform that creates OFDM, QAM and legacy signals for customer devices. It's pretty cool stuff. Not only that but borrowing CDMA tech from the cellular industry can offer symmetrical bandwidth up to and beyond 1 Gbps to the home over coax. This will likely be the last "upgrade" for the coaxial network but it can be done with a significant cost savings over having to run fiber to every potential customer.
That said, Comcast is taking an extremely long time rolling out the updates. At the rate they're going it will take decades. They're prioritizing areas with high population density or areas with lots of competition to make the numbers look good, which doesn't bode well for those of us who don't have other choices. And because Comcast wants to maintain uniform marketing across the company the expanded features and potential won't be realized until some threshold of homes passed is reached. Shame that. The Innovator's Dilemma seems to be a recurring theme in technology...
Speaking of innovation, I picked up a Kenwood TH-D75 a few weeks back. I sold a few older HTs that made the price basically a wash and combined a few radios into one. Pairing it with my phone changes APRS, finally there's a proper keyboard and display for sending short messages. But I still see the same weather stations, iGates and mobile beacons. Not much else going on. I also dusted off a TM-D700 that was down in the catacombs and got it connected to my home network using a serial-to-Ethernet adapter. Using a macOS program called QTH I get the same chat capabilities and excellent maps too. This has inspired me to start pushing some of my fellow hams in the area to start using APRS with their phones and add them to the home network too. Seems like we could have a really nice general purpose announcement and chat system in the local area (actually the digipeaters cover several hundred square miles across western Colorado and Utah, so not that "local") with very little hardware investment. Heck, I might try my hand at building a Raspbian image with DIrewolf configured to use a CM108 and Baofeng radio for a Zero W to hand out and make it even simpler. Not everyone likes yakking on the repeater all afternoon, but would like to know that 15 meters is open or that someone's going to lunch. I know most of the communications at workplaces are now on chat apps, no reason why that can't happen on APRS with better user software.
Ready - I'm not railing at the Hybrid Fiber / Coax architecture of Comcast quite so much as I am railing against the sad state of 20 or 30 or even 50 year old coaxial cable run underground or swinging in the wind from poles as the infrastructure for household broadband connectivity. It's old, tired, dumb. AT&T tried to do the same thing with their Hybrid Fiber / Copper in some of their service areas and that was even worse. Both Comcast and AT&T invested SO much in these schemes to avoid doing Fiber To The Premises that in the end, FTTP was actually cheaper, and still they won't do it because they can find enough customers that will put up with the flawed delivery systems because they simply don't know that there are alternatives. It's kind of the same story with "Household Broadband Service" from the wireless companies selling a little puck that supposedly can provide household broadband. It doesn't because the cellular infrastructure is designed for phones, not broadband streaming. The cellular companies could easily provide a competitive broadband experience with the excess capacity of their 5G upgrades... but they don't want to do the needed step of installing a fixed, directional antenna pointed at the cell tower for adequate signal. That would put the cellular companies in the consumer infrastructure business, which they're loathe to do.
Kudos that you're getting up to speed on APRS. There's a wealth of such largely unused capabilities in APRS. APRS creator Bob Burning KB4APR continually tried to explain that, but he went largely unheard. Folks are largely content to look at maps with moving cars. I *hope* *Hope* *HOPE* that the APRS Foundation actually puts themselves into a position that they can start evangelizing and explaining this stuff in a broader perspective than "The Cult of WB4APR" was able to do.
If (and I emphasize "if") the coax was installed properly and not damaged over the years it will continue to perform. But 'nuff about that.
I remember WB4APR's promotion of APRS at the DCC, often rather loudly while someone was giving a presentation hi hi. For sure the protocol was ahead of the hardware of the time, with limited keypad text entry and small displays it wasn't very practical... and that's with a TNC in the radio. I can't imagine trying to send a beacon with a DTMF keypad. One of the reasons for Meshtastic's recent success is the "smartphone peripheral" design and app user interface, something that I think should be copied for APRS use. Which gets the wheels turning. Most everything is there except for a really modern app. I know that APRSDroid is no longer under development, and most of the iOS apps are set up for connecting via APRS-IS first. Heck the Meshtastic app will send notifications to my watch!
It's great that we have the APRI-IS and aprs.fi in place, but I think the average ham sees them and figures that's what APRS is. I noticed POTA activations and special events posted only on APRS-IS, not sent over RF at all. I'm sure the POTA web admins aren't intentionally ignoring the RF network , just that the gateways aren't going to pass traffic from the Internet no matter what (even though I know the APRS-IS can be filtered by geographic boundary). And I wonder how often packets just get pulled into a gateway and done? The fatal error of the APRS-IS is that it Hoovers up the whole planet. Most of us don't care about the whole world, only our little place of interest. Maybe there's a use case for speciality -IS servers that only pass whatever is of interest, or regional passthrough. You'd have to send a "join" packet, much like the ANSRVR relay service or something. Might not even generate that much new RF traffic either, if done in a multicast sort of way.
Ready - Agreed, but lifetime of coax (as opposed to hardline) is measured in years, not decades, especially overhead, subject to wind, rain, physical abuse (poles being hit, etc.)
All of those issues are known, and I wish the APRS Foundation (https://www.aprsfoundation.org) would cease their navel-gazing and start weighing in about fundamental issues in the APRS ecosystem exactly like what you're describing. I just don't understand why APRSF isn't visibly DOING anything and engaging the APRS community at large (at least, no engagement that I'm aware of). APRS Foundation is spending down their goodwill rapidly having been formed two years ago and having done nothing of substance (again, in public, that I'm aware of... and I LOOK for such activity).
Steve, it is always a pleasure to crack open Zero Retries. I look forward to it every week, knowing you are going to have great content that stretches my thinking. I appreciate your work very much. The icing on this cake was to discover your very gracious recommendation of the Random Wire newsletter. Thank you! Looking forward to that cup of coffee! ...Tom KJ7T
Tom - Similarly, it's aways a pleasure to find The Random Wire in MY email inbox and thus look forward to several good readings to absorb all the hard won wisdom that you share. I am *NOT* exaggerating in saying that if there was more material out there with the quality and depth that you bring to bear with TRW, I may not have felt such an unmet need for Zero Retries. Zero Retries didn't get to where it is without lots of generous mentions along the way, and thus I am powerfully motivated to "Pay It Forward" when I see someone like you doing such a good job.