[aprssig] OT: Yaesu to release digital amateur radio gear

[Heikki Hannikainen]

On Mon, 9 Jan 2012, Greg Dolkas wrote:

> This got me thinking (yeah, a dangerous thing)...  I believe Ham Radio
> "owns" an entire Class-A IPv4 address block.  14.x.x.x.

44. Not 14.

>  That should be
> enough to give every Ham radio on the planet their own RF-side IP
> address.  Can't we do something with this?  What's it being used for?

Mostly unused in practice, although most of it is allocated to local 
radio-based IP networks all around the world, and further to individual 
amateurs. Most of those allocations are not reachable or used in any way, 
though.

There are some very active exceptions in some areas, though - people 
building new high-speed data networks, etc, and using 44/8 for that.

http://www.ampr.org/
http://wiki.ampr-gateways.org/

We considered trying to assign 44.* IP addresses to the DMR radios we 
have, but that simply didn't work. The DMR designers apparently didn't 
understand IP subnetting, or how IP allocation worked on the Internet. It 
requires a whole /8 block for a DMR network, and internally uses the 
following /8 block too.

We used network number 10, and the next 3 bytes of the IP address come 
from the ID number of the radio. My HT's ID is 2447005 
(http://www.n6dva.org/trbo-database/trbo_users_view.php). 2447005, 
converted to a binary network-byte-order integer (the bytes would be 37 86 
157) and prepended with the network number 10, becomes the IP address 
10.37.86.157. There is no way to make that match the existing 44.* 
allocations (44.139.* would be Finland). To add insult to that, it also 
utilizes 11.* (the next network after the configured CAI network, which 
happens to be allocated for the US DoD).

So, no 44/8 allocation for DMR/MotoTRBO. But for 128 Kbit/s D-Star on 1.2 
GHz, sure. Or 5 GHz WLAN links configured to run within the 5 GHz amateur 
band, great. Or something else that would be new and innovative.

   - Hessu