Yeah, so... the thing is there really are benefits to ham radio for the community. I 100% believe in that. And yes, there are a lot of neck beards but, honestly, look at some pictures from a NANOG meeting! ;) I have been massively inactive in Amateur Radio for some time. I miss it. However I am acutely aware of how ham plays a very valuable, amazing role in emergency situations. Even on a small scale, during the last Seattle snow (which was pretty much a joke by the standards of any place that gets real snow) I know that Seattle ACS was coordinating emergency transportation for dialysis patients that could not find transportation, things like that. Things that no right-minded taxpayer wants to pay for the gov to operate on a continous basis but things that are really absolutely necessary! In the California earthquakes, ham has often been the only remaining method of emergency communications. Now, did 44/8 help in any of that? I honestly don't know. Does ampr.org really need a /8? That is probably a very reasonable question. Honestly I think there are other protocol stacks that perform much better for digital transmission than IP on ham radio anyway. Is it being managed tightly? I'd say not in some ways... I am very glad to see this still exists from a personal perspective but I haven't used IP over ham in over 15 years and, well: dhcp182:~ carlr$ dig kb7lig.ampr.org ; <<>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> kb7lig.ampr.org ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 45474 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;kb7lig.ampr.org. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: kb7lig.ampr.org. 14400 IN A 44.24.100.9 ;; Query time: 217 msec ;; SERVER: 10.1.0.248#53(10.1.0.248) ;; WHEN: Thu May 26 17:27:07 2011 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 49 But so here is a "system" that is capable of playing a key role in improving many peoples' lives (if actually used), helping in emergencies, assisting during armageddon (?), etc. There are an awful lot of netblocks that are used for much less valid things (IMHO)... but since those make money, everyone endorses it and considers it "proper". I fully support ham radio retaining a decent block. Why don't we all just speed along this IPv6 adoption thing here. If anyone deserved to be allowed to avoid IPv6 is is ham radio. Just the increase in address size might add another 12 hours to my image transfer! But seriously. I am a networking professional but also a ham. I could see looking into shrinking the .ampr.org 44/8 allocation, and if the right decisions were made I could even support it. But really I would vote for improved IPv6 adoption by everyone else as well as better address utilization by commercial entities before trying to strip this away from ham radio. As for the note about spectrum: ham radio has TINY amounts of spectrum. I haven't done the math in years / looked at the numbers but I think a couple of local TV broadcasts take up more spectrum than all of the worldwide ham bands combined. So seriously? Really? All that said, IPv4 exhaustion is scary, including to me. I realize the world won't come crashing down but the potential business implications are pretty staggering. Couple of notes: my opinion, not necessarily my employers. also, I have not been involved in .ampr.org politicking since I was a teen-ager so I prolly don't have all of the facts. Please convert any flames to educational status. :) Thanks, --carl KB7LIG On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 3:07 PM, Jaime Magiera <jaime@sensoryresearch.net> wrote:
On May 26, 2011, at 5:02 PM, Jack Carrozzo wrote:
I reckon it'd be about as hard to get back 44/8 as 11/8, but with more neckbeards. Anytime the fcc tries to reclaim frequencies all these guys come out of the wood work with the magic phrase 'emergency communications' and some congressmen get on their side about it.
It will be amusing to see, yes.
<out of the woodwork> from our cold dead hands. </out of the woodwork>
kd8mzn
-- Carl Rosevear Manager of Operations Skytap, Inc. direct (206) 588-8899