ARETF is reimagining its original mission of developing standards for Amateur Radio networking.
This new mission for ARETF includes becoming a nexus where people discuss interesting new ideas in Amateur Radio that haven’t yet been implemented, as well as discussion of existing projects and systems in Amateur Radio that could be combined or repurposed or adapted to achieve interesting new capabilities.
For example, a discussion of “wouldn’t it be neat to have a new sound card mode that did x…” that is read by a grad student looking for a challenging idea for their thesis which results in that new sound card mode becoming available. Another example is a discussion of an interesting idea proposed a decade (or two) ago that wasn’t practical to implement then because we didn’t have cheap and powerful compute power like what is now available in a Raspberry Pi running Linux. Yet another example is to highlight a project such as the Terrestrial Amateur Radio Packet Network (TARPN) that is doing interesting things, but not yet widely known. And much more.
One reason for ARETF reimagining its mission is the emergence of Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) as a source of grants that can fund “interesting new things in Amateur Radio”. (Those are my words – see ARDC’s grantmaking guidelines for details). ARDC just announced a Request For Proposals.
A primary goal of ARETF is that all projects discussed (for implementation) within ARETF are intended to be freely available to the public.
We’ll flesh out this new vision in future posts here, including ways to join the discussion.
Steve Stroh N8GNJ
Amateur Radio Engineering Task Force 