This is about a ham radio issue, and probably won’t be comprehensible to non-hams.
To give you a very brief background, I was instrumental in elimination of the Morse Code test for Radio Amateurs, the founding of Open Source, and the creation of Open Source digital voice for Amateur Radio. I still create, evangelize, and code today.
This piece is my opinion. I am on the advisory board of the M17 project, but am not speaking for that project, or anyone else.
My issues with ARDC go back long before their recent, very sudden, decision not to accept applications for grants from the M17 project any longer. But I should make this clear: Everyone at ARDC means well, and wants to do the best for Amateur Radio. Even if, IMO, they are failing at that in some ways.
ARDC’s decision to part ways with M17, coincidentally I think, was followed by the the sudden removal of M17 from MMDVM over what seems to be an interpersonal conflict. Wojciech Kaczmarski, M17 key developer, has responded very positively to my criticism that this came about due to his behavior, not just that of other developers. And we’ve formed an official M17 advisory board of 5 people, so that he can have more support.
M17 responded to the removal by creating a new WSPD (a next-generation digital voice software suite for Amateur Radio) fork restoring M17 and continuing advanced development, which I am told now has more vitality than other projects.
Wojciech and his collaborators seem to have architected a triumphal exit from M17’s involvement with ARDC and the MMDVM fiasco, releasing not just the WSPD fork, but an amazing hardware project called LinHT, which you can see here. What is LinHT? It’s a handheld transceiver with a 500 KHz I/Q modulated SDR based on Semtech SX1255 RF-to-digital transceiver IC, capable of all modes and as much as 2 megabit per-second communications, and including a Linux system-on-module. Because production of good HT cases isn’t something we have down yet, it fits in a Retevis C62 case. [We could use a good project with industrial designers who just make HT cases, visually desirable ones, and injection molded, please, not jaggy 3D prints.] Developers can use GNU Radio flowgraphs or C/C++ on the built-in development platform in the HT! Prototypes work today and an alpha production run is being sponsored by PCBWay. If you want to start working on the platform before boards are available, the SXceiver is a good way to learn SX1255 and develop for it. There is a SoapySDR driver for it, so you can get it running with existing SDR software, or GNU Radio, immediately.
LinHT is the most important hardware project in Amateur Radio today. Among other things, it is the perfect platform to run a variant of RADE on VHF/UHF. RADE may just be the future of voice, all voice, on Amateur Radio. It integrates what we used to use a CODEC and MODEM for into one unified component powered by machine learning (the non-hype version of AI). In tests, it works at a significantly lower signal-to-noise ratio than analog voice modes, even SSB, and legacy digital modes like D*STAR and DMR, while providing better fidelity, noise immunity, and fade resistance.
Even if RADE isn’t the next big thing, LinHT should get us there, because it provides a hardware platform capable of running new, experimental, and modified modes, and isn’t limited to just FM and FSK. Your smartphone uses complex multi-carrier modulation, HF digital modes use it, your HT should too.
I was involved in an effort to create a similar, though less capable thing, called Whitebox, with the technology of 12 years ago. The Whitebox effort failed because the design had too much electrical noise, and we spent too much time building the computer and too little working on RF. LinHT uses a pre-made single-board-computer with an ARM CPU containing two ARM A55 processors, a Mali GPU, and an Ethos-U65 microNPU to accelerate machine-learning applications, all combined on to a “stamp” form module, which is soldered onto the main PCB, and costs as little as $32 in quantity. Thus, very little of LinHT effort is invested in the computer side of the design, and the design can easily change as better single-board modules become available. And Wojciech and his crew are probably better RF engineers than we were 12 years ago.
I think ARDC has shot themselves in the foot, because they won’t be involved in the LinHT project. The reason, as stated at their new policy, is that ARDC will not accept projects where the community fractures, where they don’t work with their prospective partners well, or where they don’t communicate well with their users.
What’s wrong with that? Several things:
In the case of M17, the project released a few members who submitted their own grant request for M17 without the cooperation of the overall project, confusing ARDC about the project leadership, and then departed, by their own written admission, with equipment that was property of the M17 project and funded by ARDC. M17 is much better off without those folks, in my honest opinion. But the response to M17 asking ARDC what to do about the non-return of equipment was a reply that ARDC had no advice and would no longer consider M17 grant applications. Wojciech and the M17 project are proud of having approached ARDC in an open and transparent manner about this issue, despite the outcome. But the lesson learned is that it might be best for other ARDC-funded projects to hide such issues from ARDC. Any conflict, project forks, etc. Make your own moral decisions. And that’s even though we know well that forks are healthy for Open Source communities.
The second issue is that the things cited by ARDC as reasons for rejection are all issues of interpersonal relationships. This ignores a key distinction of Radio Amateurs and Open Source Developers: a lot of us aren’t neurotypical. I have noticed this especially in the most creative and productive among us. Many of us, diagnosed or not, exhibit traits associated with autism spectrum disorder, level 1. We can be very focused on one topic, to the exclusion of others. We can be very persuasive in speech and writing, and of normal or greater intelligence, but we have problems with interpersonal relationships and the perception of emotional cues and nuance. We may be more comfortable talking with you on the radio, or using a key or keyboard; than we might be if we met face-to-face. And most critically: We’re not always good at getting along with others. I personally am not neurotypical, and took two decades to speak clearly and not walk on my toes.
Unfortunately, some of the ARDC staff obtained their ham licenses during the onboarding process, and can’t be expected to have a long familiarity with Radio Amateurs and our quirks. So, perhaps they missed this point about our community.
Thus, we have some mainly neurotypical people who wish the non-neurotypical folks would just act like them. Sorry, they’re just not built that way. ARDC could approach them with more sympathy and understanding, rather than the sudden, outright rejection that we have seen.
We also have a potential law violation. Since ARDC’s rules on rejecting projects for reasons based on interpersonal relationships are very specific to the developer community member’s disabilities, they may violate Title III of the Americans With Disabilities Act, and other law requiring handicapped accommodation in organizations; and also in connection with employment, since developers in question were funded to be employed full-time. Thus, ARDC might be vulnerable to lawsuits based on civil-rights law by any developer rejected under their policy who can show a diagnosis.
And I think there’s also a degree of conflict-avoidance in ARDC’s policy. But projects should stand for something! M17, for example, stands for the rejection of black-box technology like the AMBE codec used in all commercial digital voice systems, and its replacement with Open Source technology that hams own; like CODEC2, and later, RADE. That’s something worth fighting for, and about.
Other issues with ARDC:
There’s where the money came from. It’s from selling 1/4 of the IPv4 address block allocated to Amateur Radio to Amazon Web Services, for about USD$134 Million dollars. ARDC continues to hold the remaining 3/4, which is very sparsely used by hams. This address block, Net 44, contained 1/249 of all usable public IPv4 addresses worldwide, and was issued to Amateur Radio by the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), for free, in the early days of the Internet.
I am on record, on the ARDC mailing list archives, of having asked ARDC to return this IP block to ARIN once IPv4 addresses became scarce, and it was clear that there was no significant use of Net 44 on the air any longer. Amateur use of 1200-Baud TCP/IP, which vies with carrier pigeons for the slowest transport prize, had mostly ended with the rise of the Internet. Other responsible agencies, like Stanford University, HP, Xerox, APNIC and ARIN itself returned their similar blocks or assigned them to be redistributed, to hold off IPv4 address exhaustion until the world could switch to IPv6, which is still incomplete today. My request was refused by Brian Kantor and other people on the then ARDC mailing list (ARDC was not as organized when they only managed the moribund Net 44). So, IMO, Amateur Radio did not act responsibly, to the general public, in the face of worldwide IPv4 address exhaustion, with a very few people making the decision. This very few people making the decision would become a recurring motif with ARDC. Once the opportunity to make money came along, ARDC did release part of those same addresses, again not involving a broader Amateur community. And the income from those addresses, again, is managed and allocated, with more people than before because they have opened up committees, but still by a very small group.
Did ARDC damage Amateur Radio by the sale of its addresses? No. They didn’t ask your permission, but you weren’t hurt. Of course all new Amateur Radio development should use IPv6, which won’t exhaust its address space as IPv4 has. ARDC still can dispense very many more public IPv4 addresses than there are hams worldwide. And each of the remaining IPv4 addresses that ARDC can dispense comes with 4 billion IPv6 addresses. You won’t run out.
But the proceeds from that sale have made ARDC the 800-Pound Gorilla. They can do whatever they want, and they aren’t responsible to anyone but themselves and IRS. They have tons of money, and too many people want it. You may be able to influence ARDC by joining one of their committees, if they let you in.
Unfortunately, the 800-pound gorilla hurts people and projects, and not just with things like the sudden and unexpected termination of M17. One way is that they insist that your project be a non-profit, for their tax compliance reasons, but they don’t tell you about the bad things that will happen to your non-profit if you get most of your funding from just one donor, ARDC. That would be true for most projects that operate their own non-profits. It’s a part of the IRS rules called the public-support test, which requires that non-profit funding must come from multiple donors, not mainly one, and may result in your organization losing its 501(c)3 non-profit status.
Why doesn’t ARDC tell you about this? Their lawyers told them not to. So, off their funded organizations go, blithely and uninformed, into a pit of non-compliance with IRS regulations that may span years and be complicated and expensive to exit.
However, it is perfectly possible for ARDC’s lawyers to tell them how they could make sure their funded organizations are well-advised by a third party, even before applying for grants, without placing ARDC at risk. Structuring your organization to pass the public-support test is a pretty easy process, if you know what to do early enough. Making sure organizations know how to do that should actually be part of ARDC’s due diligence. That they let this issue persist, IMO, indicates that ARDC might need better legal counsel ( see this ) unless the lawyers have competently advised and there’s some leadership problem.
And finally, I think ARDC fails by exclusively funding projects, not people. This limits how much “R” they can really have in “R&D”, as you have to go into your grant application with a complete plan of what you are going to build. But real researchers start by exploring ideas, and don’t necessarily know what will come out of them. So, the act of creating something really brand new can’t be funded by ARDC within its own guidelines, and the “R&D” they do fund will really just be development, to build out something already known. I’ve discussed this, and the alternative, in more detail here.
So, what am I doing about this? I’m not being quiet about it, and neither should you. I have often sent my criticism to ARDC, and met with them. They’ve told me they circulate my comments, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen any advice put into effect. So, it became time to bring you into the discussion. I continue to work on Post Open so that Open Source developers will not have to continue to be supplicants, dependent on corporations, and grantors like ARDC, for all of their funding; but will receive fair compensation for their work.