radioAe6rt

After a number of years away, I decided to rejoin the ranks of radio amateurs, having once been WN0OWP in Missouri, and now AE6RT. Mike Outmesguine’s book Wi-Fi Tricks contained a chapter on building a 3-element Yagi out of — a tongue depressor and three paper clips for 2.4GHz. One look at the picture of the completed antenna and I was thunderstruck. I could no more not go back to amateur radio and all its RF experimentation possibilities than you can not think of an pink elephant with purple polkadots right now.

Amateur radio during my father’s generation was as cool as podcasting is now (podcasting is cool, isn’t it?). The irony is that it’s lost none of its appeal. Every night at 7:30pm Pacific, I can tune to 14.313MHz and hear the volunteer amateur operators of the Pacific Seafarer’s Net take roll call of private sailing vessels plying the South Pacific — live (hear them via Shoutcast, too). I can build my own radio and use it to transmit over whatever distances it can muster. I can do software radio. I can do radio in every portion of the radio spectrum from millimeters (fractions of an inch) to 160 meters (~500 feet). I can launch a signal on 20meters across the mighty Pacific, and have someone at the other end hear it, and respond — if the sun and ionosphere cooperate.

Of course, television and the Internet obsoleted amateur radio. So they say.

Our group at EarthLink recently released a firmware upgrade to the popular Linksys WRT54G home router. The firmware allows a home LAN to now support IPv4 and IPv6 side by side, one not impeding the other. We also offer IPv6 routing services on an experimental best-effort basis, so the IPv6 packets in the home can go someplace useful.

If one is in the Internet business, end-to-end puts food on your table. It puts food in the mouths of your children. If you are in the information business, and aren’t we all, it puts your thoughts, your music, your audio, your image, your expression, in front of someone else’s eyes and ears. End-to-end is the people’s influence. NAT giveth address-accounting-free home networking, but NAT taketh away end-to-end. Without end-to-end, the Internet slowly begins (frog in heating water) to resemble — the phone company. That’s where you get the applications you want when someone else decides you should have them.

I have seen intelligent discussion on p2p overlay networks obviating the need for something like IPv6. And I have seen not so intelligent discussion where “We have NAT to enable home networking. Why do we need IPv6?”. p2p obviating IPv6 is interesting, and requires deeper consideration.

NAT is a tax on all the applications that won’t get written because traversing it is just too hard. What are these applications? UDP-based voice, for one. The rest of them, I don’t know. But the world is a better place for compilers, even though we don’t know what code gets written today and compiled tomorrow. I can believe the same thing about NAT. Remove it and let’s see what code gets written.

Will deploying IPv6 be hard? Back-breaking hard, and that includes home security. But it’s deserving of consideration — for all those apps that might get written and for all the food they put on the table.

There are on the Internet a number of practice exams for the U.S. amateur radio service. To ensure that there are always enough, my giveback.