2025-07-11 — Zero Retries Enters Its Fifth Year, What’s New at DLARC — Packet Radio History, Ten More Days for Comments re: AST SpaceMobile, Year Five of the Zero Retries Experiment In Progress
Steve, I echo your desire to have some kind of standards tracking body within the hobby. I think that interoperability should be preferred, but obviously if the nature of the experimentation just doesn't make it technically feasible, that's not a huge deal. But I think that honestly some effort should be made to 'untie' (unite) the dyslexic hobby that is Amateur Radio and that some sort of tracking body might help that. There are so many parallel efforts, of which some do have honest novel ideas, but some of which might be better served by pulling together. And I think a lot of it is due to simply not being aware of these parallel efforts.
John - Thanks for your support. This just seems like such an obvious need but as with so many things in Amateur Radio, it comes down to who could / would do the work? And it's not like grant funding would help create this as there's no significant expense to it other than perhaps funding for website hosting that won't spam you with ads. It just boils down to a matter of is there enough widespread support to come together to do so.
Re: tips like using “The Commission,” establishing standing with your callsign, establishing credibility with your address...
I looked everywhere for a collection of FCC comment best practices for Delete, Delete, Delete. The best thing I found was this, but I wish there was a ham radio version: https://publiccommentproject.org/how-to
I note the ARRL provides lots of "help" for navigating the FCC's websites for getting licensed. Why not guides with definitive, professional recommendations on how to make effective comments on amateur radio-related dockets?
Mike - Agreed that the "National Association for Amateur Radio" should make it easier to reply to the US regulatory agency in charge of Amateur Radio with some easy to find guidelines.
I did find some of the early PRTN, and dug into ALOHA, since much of that wound up in AX.25 Packet Radio. Early exploration happened when I got to work with an X.25 network, and early TAPR TNCs and TCP via packet. It was some deep learning that became a foundation for even more interesting puzzles!
What's so cool in this era, with DLARC, is that you can "deep dive" into all of these, such as reading serial issues of magazines nearly in realtime instead of waiting for each month's installment. Not to mention being able to read all those magazines and newsletters (and government publications) that one couldn't afford to subscribe to back in the day.
To show how far back in the TCP/IP world BBN goes, they have the BGP Autonomous System Number (ASN) of 1.
Uncle - Agreed! BBN was a legend in the early days of the Internet. It's a shame that name was subsumed into another corp.
Steve, I echo your desire to have some kind of standards tracking body within the hobby. I think that interoperability should be preferred, but obviously if the nature of the experimentation just doesn't make it technically feasible, that's not a huge deal. But I think that honestly some effort should be made to 'untie' (unite) the dyslexic hobby that is Amateur Radio and that some sort of tracking body might help that. There are so many parallel efforts, of which some do have honest novel ideas, but some of which might be better served by pulling together. And I think a lot of it is due to simply not being aware of these parallel efforts.
John - Thanks for your support. This just seems like such an obvious need but as with so many things in Amateur Radio, it comes down to who could / would do the work? And it's not like grant funding would help create this as there's no significant expense to it other than perhaps funding for website hosting that won't spam you with ads. It just boils down to a matter of is there enough widespread support to come together to do so.
Made three attempts this morning to submit express comments to FCC on AST's proposal and website gave error with submission.
Re: tips like using “The Commission,” establishing standing with your callsign, establishing credibility with your address...
I looked everywhere for a collection of FCC comment best practices for Delete, Delete, Delete. The best thing I found was this, but I wish there was a ham radio version: https://publiccommentproject.org/how-to
I note the ARRL provides lots of "help" for navigating the FCC's websites for getting licensed. Why not guides with definitive, professional recommendations on how to make effective comments on amateur radio-related dockets?
Mike - Agreed that the "National Association for Amateur Radio" should make it easier to reply to the US regulatory agency in charge of Amateur Radio with some easy to find guidelines.
Mike - My guide - Zero Retries Guide to Submitting Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Comments and Reply Comments, is now online - https://www.zeroretries.org/p/zero-retries-guide-to-submitting.
I did find some of the early PRTN, and dug into ALOHA, since much of that wound up in AX.25 Packet Radio. Early exploration happened when I got to work with an X.25 network, and early TAPR TNCs and TCP via packet. It was some deep learning that became a foundation for even more interesting puzzles!
What's so cool in this era, with DLARC, is that you can "deep dive" into all of these, such as reading serial issues of magazines nearly in realtime instead of waiting for each month's installment. Not to mention being able to read all those magazines and newsletters (and government publications) that one couldn't afford to subscribe to back in the day.