Internet Archive has begun gathering content for the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC), which will be a massive online library of materials and collections related to amateur radio and early digital communications.
The DLARC project is looking for contributors with troves of ham radio, amateur radio, and early digital communications related books, magazines, documents, catalogs, manuals, videos, software, personal archives, and other historical records collections, no matter how big or small. In addition to physical material to digitize, we are looking for podcasts, newsletters, video channels, and other digital content that can enrich the DLARC collections.
This is a mammoth task but an important one. I wonder if there's a way to collaborate with existing collections of historical Amateur radio data, such as the famous "QSL Collection" from Vienna: https://www.dokufunk.org/index.php?lang=EN
I think they have more material than probably anyone else in the world, but much of it is "offline" (partly digitized but not web accessible).
Another huge collection of historic QSL cards, bios of deceased radio amateurs and other stuff: http://hamgallery.com/
Amatuer radio seems full of little software tools to do calculations that are closed source. I hope the authors can be encouraged to publish source, or it will die with them.
Not just closed source but a completely black box, like the ROS and Pactor 4 digimodes. (To be fair, the latter is a commercial product so the blame is on ham radio operators, not the company who designed it.)
I've always been curious as to how they "got away" with being proprietary: encryption isn't allowed on amateur bands, but given its black box nature, the codec (?) might as well be a cipher.
At least in the US, the FCC largely ignores amateur radio and related services. Unless they start causing interference with other services. In general an amateur digital mode cannot have encryption (there are a few exceptions). A digital mode must have a published specification as well. PACTOR is not published to my knowledge.
The ARRL petitioned for an increase to the symbol rate on the HF bands almost a decade ago. The FCC never formally did anything with it.
It was a few years back, but at one point the FCC issued a 200+ kw license for a transmitter right at the top of the 20m band. Why? I have no clue. It isn't like the operator couldn't afford a commercial license.
The FCC barely does anything about interference coming from equipment that affects amateurs. I've had substantially more luck contacting manufacturers and constructors directly. Just google "solaredge RFI" if you want more info about this.
It took a commercial radio manufacturer years of professional lobbying to convince the FCC that the CB radio spectrum could in fact be with FM. The FCC is about 50 years behind on regulation for the CB radio. There is a huge amount of very valuable spectrum that could be used for citizen radio purposes with type accepted equipment very cheaply. But the FCC does not allow it.
The FCC approved DFS for Wi-Fi, but didn't actually specify what the equipment was supposed to do when it must mitigate interference. All the equipment I've seen just switches the AP to the first 5 ghz channel and leaves it there. Forever. Likewise the FCC approved a new 5 ghz band for WiFi and similar services and puts power limits on emissions, as they should. But none of the chosen channels have a power limit of something very low like 0dbmw or similar. I have neighbors who find it fit to run an AP on every single available channel in the WiFi spectrum. I would just like one I can use in my house comfortably without getting interference. If we're going to have all this spectrum, why not take one channel and put a very low power limit on it? That way residential customers could use it in their house knowing they aren't receiving interference or generating it.
The FCC regulation is almost always lagging behind reality for spectrum they aren't paid for. Cellular and stuff gets all the attention, since that is where the money is. The transition to ATSC from NTSC for broadcast television would be a good example. That happened quickly and without endless debate as to the merit of it.
The FCC regulations don't take "might as well" into consideration, they only prohibit "messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning". So, ACTUAL encryption, not EFFECTIVE encryption, however you want to define that.
Since PACTOR is not "encryption" in the sense that the algorithm may be generally known but the secret key is not, it doesn't run afoul of the regulations. There's nothing in the regulations saying that the modulation or encoding used must be open or publicly available somehow. At best, it might be a gray area if the person/company providing it selectively decided who to sell it to.
And according to wikipedia: "Pactor modes other than level 1 (P1) are not open source,[14][15] but are publicly documented[16] and can be monitored and decoded easily over the air by third parties using free Raspberry Pi software ("PMON for Raspberry Pi")[17] or PMON utility on the modem itself.[18]"
All of THAT being said, I would certainly be in favor of a rule change that only allowed fully-published non-patented codecs on the amateur bands. That would of course wipe out all of the existing VHF/UHF digital modes since (nearly?) all of them use AMBE which must be licensed.
Yeah or the other way around :( The developer of the excellent SP packet terminal committed suicide after years of bullying on the air (not sure what the exact story is there but I used this software at the time). https://www.bungi.com/sigi/index.html
Maybe they want it that way? Why do you always need access to someone else's work. Many of them build these apps to fund their hobbies or put a little food on the table.
amateur radio service means a radiocommunication service in which radio apparatus are used for the purpose of self-training, intercommunication or technical investigation by individuals who are interested in radio technique solely with a personal aim and *without pecuniary interest;* (service de radioamateur)
Pecuniary rules apply to operating radio services using amateur radio for business. It doesn't mean you are restricted from profiting from create equipment, tools, or training.
You can absolutely talk about these interests, your business, or your work building things (e.g. antennas) for the ham market. You just can't conduct business, such as hopping on 80M and advertising a sale on antennas, or taking payment for communications between parties, for example.
Not an amateur radio guy myself but from what I understand it's supposed to be a strictly non-commercial undertaking which means it's a bit churlish to keep your code closed-source.
Probably totally digress, but I wish IA can organize their digital library slightly better.
One day I was checking some manga books by ISBN on IA just out of curiosity. And for some reason, it put the ISBNs for all the volumes of a manga into one single entry (https://archive.org/details/isbn_1919979003907, check "ISBN" metadata section) and unsurprisingly, the actual content is only one volume, vol.43 (not even vol.1!). I have a feeling other volumes may exist somewhere there, but there is no way to search for them.
This isn't a one-off occurrence either, it reflects my experience for trying to find specific item there well, especially for non-English books.
A lot of the time the metadata accuracy is up to the original uploader. IA's upload system doesn't magically fill in all the metadata details for an item.
Also doesn't allow other to update metadata or even submit for review.
Wikidata has a property for Internet Archive ID, so it wouldn't be conceptually hard to construct a parallel metadata store there, but it would involve hundreds of millions of triples so it's definitely "hard" in other senses.
While I also wish the Archive to be more precise - e.g. in the "Author" and in the "Year of publication" fields -,
I suggest that you check their RSS feeds to see how staggeringly high the rate of uploads is. That uploading is "frenetic" (in a good way of course) reveals where the focus is. For re-assessing and fixing the records a parallel team would probably be needed.
I would gladly help towards that: I never checked but maybe one can volunteer.
Ahh, this is great. I was already seriously impressed by the amount of amateur radio content on the Internet Archive. I'm happily surprised to see some solicitation for even more content! Passing this along to my relevant communities/clubs/etc. (also just emailed one possible place to archive :))
Before internet the physical cards ware the proof that you had had that contact.
They ware needed for awards in in many countries to even advance from your license class upwards.
In Finland one had to have 300 confirmed (paper QSL card received) contacts with morse code before you could even attempt the tests for higher license classes that allowed voice and data.
Thankfully now abolished, along with the mandatory morse code requirement.
The IA has really lost its reputation as an archive by choosing to remove content down for political purposes. They see themselves as publishers rather than an archive.
I found: (1) they recently removed KiwiFarms; (2) in 2020, they began labeling certain pages with "fact checks"; (3) they remove content by request of the site owner or by copyright complaint.
Of those, (2) seems the most political, but it's not removing content. Was there something else you had in mind?
Removing kiwi farms was a bad decision. The copyright and site owner did not request it and the content was not illegal. So the IA is picking content to delist based on their own feelings rather than simply archiving.
> Supporters of the Drop Kiwi Farms campaign celebrated the Internet Archive’s decision. “Internet heroes right here,” tweeted Yonah Gerber, who urged the Archive to remove the site. Kiwi Farms is known for collecting and publicizing personal details about targets it holds in contempt, many of whom are transgender women like Sorrenti. While the site ostensibly discourages direct harassment, Sorrenti has faced swatting attacks and persistent threats during her campaign, and other targets have had similarly ugly experiences. Kiwi Farms has been allegedly linked with three suicides, including an emulator developer who blamed the site for a relentless harassment operation soon before their death. [1]
Yeah, I have to say that I recognize nuance and am okay with archive.org nixing content like the above.
The problem with IA dropping the site was that no one could actually verify the claims about it while the site had been taken offline by the same campaign. It’s not a wonderful site but most of the claims the media make are easily proven false. For some reason much of the media confuses kiwi farms with 8chan and makes completely incorrect statements on it.
The emulator dev was never the subject of any kiwifarms discussion. Their letter blamed the state of mental health in America, Donald Trump, and kiwi farms. If that’s the bar for a site being pulled offline, then all social media should be.
The content was embarrassing and revealing for the people it concerned (hence efforts to remove it through any means necessary), but not libelous or defamatory - it consisted of archived material of their own words.
Libelous/defamatory content is not illegal in the same vein as pirated movies or CSAM, in that the Internet Archive would be criminally liable for hosting it. I wouldn’t imagine it’s illegal for IA to host a snapshot of a defamatory news article, for example.
> The content was clearly libelous and defamatory, which is pretty illegal.
That is incorrect. In the US, the _act_ of libel is illegal and the author of it can get into legal trouble. And a publisher might if they knowingly published false information, which is harder to prove. But the libelous _content_ itself is not illegal and is in fact protected by the First Amendment.
Removing evidence of war-crimes and disallowing future historians from accessing such content in the future is not a policy that I would expect from an archive.
(1) is egregious if the goal is an archive of the internet.
An archive should have everything of what is being archived, legalese notwithstanding: The good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, everything. E v e r y t h i n g . If it doesn't have everything, it's not an archive.
As far as I'm concerned the IA can stick this up their arse.
They REFUSE to acknowlege my request to have a personal website that they've managed to archive removed.
It's a person blog that I want online so I can give the URL to family and friends, but I keep it out of Google etc with robots.txt. But once during an upgrade of the backend software I stuffed up the robots.txt and they crawled it until I fixed it up.
Will they reply to my emails? They will not. I'm so frustrated, they just IGNORE emails.
You picked the dumbest possible method to share something privately with family and friends but it's the Internet Archive's issue to fix? A robots.txt provides zero protection for a public website.
I didn't say it was private. It's obviously public, I give you the URL and you can pull it up. I'm not stupid enough to think that robots.txt means no one can read it! There's some RBAC control so that you need to be logged in etc if I publish anything I wish to remain private.
Most _reputable_ organisiations will respect robots.txt and not crawl your site, nor cache/archive your data if you request it.
What I want is the decision that someone's going to archive/store my website somewhere else to be MY decision, not theirs.
I have hints that they may be understaffed. If you had a little spare time, you could lend a hand to their legendary effort, and maybe contribute in fixing a few things such as your issue.
The DLARC project is looking for contributors with troves of ham radio, amateur radio, and early digital communications related books, magazines, documents, catalogs, manuals, videos, software, personal archives, and other historical records collections, no matter how big or small. In addition to physical material to digitize, we are looking for podcasts, newsletters, video channels, and other digital content that can enrich the DLARC collections.