The Amateur Radio Digital Communications Inc. is a not-for-profit organization incorporated in 2011 in the state of California that is now in the business of making grants to worthy amateur radio needs, causes and projects. It provides significant funding for the annual Youth-On-The –Air Camp such as was hosted this summer at Carleton University. This will be the topic of the main presentation at our September meeting by Roger Egan, VA3EGY who was the lead promoter that brought the Camp to Ottawa this year.
Currently the assets of the ARDC are over $135 million US. So where did all this money come from to be held by an organization that is not-for-profit?
The History
Amateur Radio Digital Communications (not the corporate entity it is today) started in part in Canada with the promotion in 1978 by then Director General, Dr John deMercao, of the Department of Communications Telecommunications Regulatory Service who introduced the “Amateur Digital Radio Operators Certificate” to foster the use and advancement of evolving packet switching and channel sharing technology by multiple users. This soon evolved in the early 1980s with the AX25 data link layer protocol that we still use today for the likes of APRS. AX25 (an amateur adapted version of the X25 protocol) got its main advancement and promotion in the early 1980s from an organization called TAPR (Tucson Amateur Packet Radio) that set protocol standards and developed micro-processor based hardware by offering the TNC-2 (terminal node controller) in kit form which was later picked up and marketed by commercial makers of amateur radio equipment. Amateur packet radio soon evolved and was active throughout the mid 1980s to most of the 1990s with infrastructure of amateur digi-peaters, nodes and auto forwarding bulletin board systems using 1200 and 9600 baud over 2 m FM radio channels and HF paths at 300 baud. As such, messaging was global.
Also in the early 1980s, there were discussions among the amateur radio folks that were learned in such matters that the new concepts of digital communications using IP (internet protocol) could be used to route amateur radio digital communications onwards; this resulted in 1981 by radio amateur Hank Manuski taking the initiative to obtain a Class A Netblock of 16.7 million IP addresses for the amateur radio service worldwide at no cost. His forethought pre-dates the public internet by over a decade. At the time, the “Internet” was conceived only to benefit research organizations and places of higher education and was never thought would be used for commercial purposes. His Class A Netblock of (44/8) addresses was called the AmprNet for “Amateur Packet Radio”. Internet gateway services, administration and hosting of DNS services was carried out at the supercomputing -centre at the University of California, San Diego. Originally, the address allocation plan reserved half of the Class A NetBlock for use by the US hams and the other half for hams in the rest of the world based on subnet numbering on a national basis. For Canada, our IP addresses were 44.196.xx.xx. Local amateur IP coordinators administered the requests for IP addresses and associated domain names created by users for their various host computers on the local networks; the regional and local volunteer administrators ensured these assignments were updated on the master DNS in California.
Obviously, this Class A block of IP addresses was very much larger than would ever be required by the radio amateur community worldwide. Following the creation of a not-for-profit corporate entity called Amateur Radio Digital Communications Inc. in 2011, the American Registry of Internet Numbers approved a request to transfer ownership of the whole 44/8 network block of the AmprNet to the newly formed company. In 2018, ARDC had limited financial resources to fulfill their corporate mission to issue grants to educational institutions, scholarship, foundations and other worthy organizations. In 2019, the company sold off half of the AMPR.org domain of IP addresses to Amazon for $109 million; this has grown to over $135 million at year end 2021. In that year, for example, ARDC provided a one-off grant of $1.6 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology amateur radio club (W1MX) to save and rebuild the radome on top of the MIT Green Building. Also, in the same year, ARDC awarded a five year grant, for a total of $1.3 million, to support US-based amateur radio activities on the ISS (ARISS-USA). Maybe, there could be funding as well for well developed plans and projects to further amateur radio in Canada!
Local History and the Ottawa Amateur Radio Packet Group.
Back in the early 1990s, some amateurs in the Ottawa area, including myself, became active in the OARC Packet Working Group. Established then was a 56 kbps radio LAN working cross band (433/220 MHz) with the hub site at the Dunton Tower on the campus of Carleton University which of course had ready access to the precious CarletonU campus internet feed. All equipment used on the high speed radio LAN consisted of up and down converting (using transverters) to the operating frequencies from the 10 m base band kit obtained from “Grapes” (the Georgia Radio Amateurs Packet Enthusiast Society. This was supported by the “PI” (packet interface) board that was the interface of the Grapes radio modem with the PC; it was an ISA bus board that was designed and manufactured by the Ottawa Packet Working Group and sold to hams all over the world at the time, that were interested in high speed amateur radio data-communications. It raised over $35,000 for the Group that was turned over the OARC after the Group disbanded in the late 1990s.
All amateur radio users of JNOS or other Network Operating systems used in amateur radio were assigned one or more 44.196.xx.xx IP addresses. The IP address administrator for our Ottawa subnet and guru for the local system at the time was Barry McLarnon VE3JF. The PCs (286 and 386 machines) used as local hosts at the time were assigned AMPRnet IP addresses. Our local host domain names usually incorporated our call sign such as “ve3lc.ampr.org”. The basic software we operated was developed and maintained by Phil Karn, KA9Q and called “JNOS” (NOS meaning “network operating system”). This software could be compiled to provide the various internet client and server services required for desired operation. JNOS supported such services and POP and SMTP email, FTP, gateway and tunneling services, DNS and even as a web server when Netscape and the world-wide-web came into play. Amateur over-the-air operation of the IP network and transport layers was encapsulated with the AX25 protocol data link layer that carried the call sign identification of radios stations involved. In the early days, it was wonderful to experience and explore the “Internet” that otherwise was limited to the privileged few at universities and places of higher learning around the continent and the world. Beyond tunneled connection to other AMPRnet LANs as they emerged worldwide, we did have access to the open internet as it was in those days through the AmprNet gateway service at UCSD. Also working with JNOS on the AMPRnet was a wonderful learning experience on how the emerging internet and its various protocols and RFCs worked in the overall system.
I hope you enjoyed this story.
73 de Norm VE3LC
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