The Jeff Pulver Blog: Guest Blogger: Dr. Mark S. Petrovic, "Internet Field Day - Common Ground for the Internet and Amateur Radio"

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February 02, 2006

Guest Blogger: Dr. Mark S. Petrovic, "Internet Field Day - Common Ground for the Internet and Amateur Radio"

Jeff's idea for Internet Field Day is a good one - I wish I'd had it. Internet Field Day would provide a natural common ground upon which two technically able communities with established cultures of "Do It Yourself" can stand. Standing in the name of the public good, a technical citizenry armed with their own means of communications and mutual assistance in time of need.

A number of my distinguished Internet colleagues (WA2BOT, WA8DZP, K7GNU, W1JQ) have the other foot in amateur radio, as I do. While these fellows can speak for themselves, our reasons for doing amateur radio are quite possibly similar: the desire to help acquire and move information in the event of local natural or manmade disaster, and the draw of the technical challenge of moving information from one place to another - in this case through free space.

Amateur Radio exists as a result of FCC Part 97. Its raison d'etre is according to Part 97.1: to recognize and enhance the value of the amateur service to the public as a voluntary noncommercial communication service, particularly with respect to providing emergency communications, and to advance the radio arts. Moreover, no communication can take place in the amateur portions of the spectrum, according to Part 97.3.4, for pecuniary interest - that is, for money. The law in Part 97 forbids operating for profit motive. Hence, amateur radio as avocation rather than vocation, and amateur signifying unpaid, not unskilled. Whatever hams do on their air, they do because they enjoy radio for its own sake and want to help in the time of need - when the infrastructure is gone.

What I, and I am sure others, have noticed is that hams and the Internet community do not always fully appreciate each other. We want to help bridge those gaps. Both sides sometimes use shorthands to think about the other. The Internet requires no permission to operate or innovate, while amateur radio is regulated and therefore antiquated. Ham radio is old and the Internet is new. Implementors of ad-hoc wireless networks know or care little about RF engineering or propagation. The Internet is too easy; real men use radio. The Internet as purveyor of spam and porn. Those sorts of stereotypes. Unfair and not by any means always deserved, but shorthand that gets used nonetheless.

Lining up behind Jeff and supporting the belief that these two communities have more in common they than have in differences, we note the following:

The aggressive practitioners in both communities love technology, love to commmunicate information, often for communication's own sake, and love to share what they know. Hams have a century long, honorable tradition of "elmering", of helping any other ham in need of RF tutelage, be in it building one's own radio, antenna, or other radio gear. And the Internet community has its collaborative open source software model, whose import and power is so clear as to require no explanation for this audience. Both communities typically own their own hardware and often donate their time to causes. It is not uncommon for members of both communities to be self-taught, a sign of strong motivation and appreciation for the self-made. Both communities have large subpopulations who insist on charting a course of technology self-determination: programmers and hackers pulling their own strings by writing code, and hams building their own radios and transmission systems. Finally, practicing the state of the art in either of these communities qualifies one for god status, and rightly so, whether it's for changing the world by writing an operating system and giving it away, conceiving of syndicated content, bouncing radio signals off the moon to a waiting recipient half a world away (the original meaning of one hop), or doing digital text messaging over HF using a scant 31 cycles of frequency space. Hams get the same head rush when doing Morse Code with a guy 5000 miles away as programmers do when they packetize 20ms of audio to RTP, send it across the network, and out it pops on the other guy's headset. And it is often of absolutely no consequence what gets said, so long as something gets said. These two communities on a fundamental level come from the same place, speak from the same place, and deserve each other's enduring and ongoing respect and the cooperation that can follow from it. And yet they can learn from each other.

Back to Internet Field Day. Every fourth full weekend in June, hams take to the field on Field Day to operate portably for 24 hours under battery or generator power --- off the grid --- in fulfillment of the good faith Part 97.1 places in them. Hams have been doing Field Day for decades. They are good at it. They know that when a civil disaster occurs, the practice they got on Field Day in taking their radio out of the house, sticking it in the car trunk, hauling it to the local school or church yard, and operating it under nonconventional power will be time well spent. Field Day is an exercise in emergency communications at a grassroots level. Private citizens helping themselves in time of need. And having fun and getting good at yet another aspect of radio. And, oh yeah, don't forget the barbeque.

Jeff's contention with Internet Field Day is that emergency ad-hoc data networks can benefit from the same annual, scheduled drilling. Is there a reason we need Wi-Fi gateways in the field when disaster strikes? How will we power them? Are there line of sight issues that we need to think about? If I need to get data to another WAP 10 miles away, how will I make that happen, given trees and buildings? Should data networks integrate with existing emergency communication systems? If yes, what systems and how? Can we, or should we, create ad-hoc county-wide networks using nothing but consumer off the shelf wireless gear operating in unlicensed spectrum? Can we do it in less than 12 hours with gear currently running in the den? The list goes on and on.

Make Internet Field Day fun, but meaningful in a technical sense, in ways that the participants define. And if hams know anything of value in this space, especially in the area of emergency power generation, line conditioning, and radio propagation, you can rest assured that they will be happy to share it in the finest spirit of amateur radio.

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Dr. Mark S. Petrovic is Amateur Radio Extra Class operator AE6RT. He has served in technology roles at AT&T, IBM, Sprint, and most recently EarthLink as Vice President R&D. At EarthLink he incubated SIP based VoIP for the company, in late 2001 when the RFCs were printed and SIP testbeds were created. He currently is relaxing. Contact Mark at mark at petrovic dot org.

Tags: voip von, ARRL, Ham Radio, Internet Field Day, Dr. Mark S. Petrovic

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Posted by jeff on February 2, 2006 06:36 AM | Permalink

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Comments

Posted by: john at October 20, 2006 01:45 PM

Posted by: cvx at October 19, 2006 04:37 PM

Posted by: JEROGatch at September 26, 2006 09:20 AM

Posted by: Douglas at March 9, 2006 02:58 AM

Mr. Galbi, thank you for the paper reference. I enjoyed reading it, posted as much on my blog today, and found it to contain a number of important ideas relating to ham radio and spectrum rights.

Reading it, I discovered another leading Internet figure who is also a ham radio operator: Bruce Perens, K6BP.

Posted by: Mark Petrovic at February 8, 2006 12:45 PM

Internet hackers and hams have fundamentally different understandings of freedom embedded in their fields. For some discussion, see Section IV.A, Different Kinds of Freedom: Hams, Hackers, and Yackers in my work, Revolutionary Ideas for Radio Regulation (available at http://www.galbithink.org/rad.htm ).

Perhaps in addition to an Internet Field Day, you could have a Ham Regulatory Forum with some Internet activists.

Posted by: Douglas Galbi at February 5, 2006 11:44 PM

February 02, 2006

Guest Blogger: Dr. Mark S. Petrovic, "Internet Field Day - Common Ground for the Internet and Amateur Radio"

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