This week, I’m headed to DEFCON, which is arguably the premiere hacking conference in the world. DEFCON hosts a a number of special interest groups they call “villages,” which organize their own sub-conferences on topics ranging from artificial intelligence to voting. One of those villages is the Ham Radio Village, and as I did last year, I’ll be teaching a one-day Tech class in the Ham Radio Village on Thursday, August 10.
So, what does this have to do with the ARRL? Well, one of the more popular amateur radio sub-hobbies is to complain about the ARRL. I won’t list them all here—my website account doesn’t have unlimited disk storage—but I think that most of you agree that there are more than a few complaints out there.
Well, part of the hacker ethos is to not just complain about things, but to do something about it. The Wikipedia entry on hacker culture puts it this way, “[hackers enjoy] the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems or electronic hardware (mostly digital electronics), to achieve novel and clever outcomes.” It seems to me that we could creatively overcome some of the limitations of the ARRL, i.e. hack the ARRL, if we put our minds to it.
I think that Parks on the Air (POTA) is a good example of this. The ARRL actually gave birth to POTA with their year-long National Parks on the Air program in 2016, which celebrated the 100th anniversary of the U.S. National Park System. It was a very popular activity, but the ARRL dropped it like a hot potato once the year was over.
Fortunately for us, a dedicated group of ham hackers stepped up and created the current POTA program. POTA is wildly popular and has been a real boon to amateur radio.
Get your hacking hats on
So, what else can be hacked? One thing that I can think of off the top of my head is Logbook of the World. At one time, there was talk about making it a more real-time system. I’m not sure whatever happened to that project, but my guess is that the programming was a lot more complicated than originally anticipated, and it got put on the back burner.
Another possible ARRL hack would be to do something about the ARRL’s digital magazines. This hack is particularly needed now that fewer and fewer members are going to be getting the print versions of QST, QEX, and the National Contest Journal. Making the information more easily accessible I think would end up being beneficial for the ARRL as well as ham radio in general.
Can you hack a hamfest?
This isn’t strictly an ARRL thing, but one aspect of ham radio that I would love to see hacked is hamfests. On Mastodon today, someone wrote:
Researching local hamfests, and they’re still such an old man thing. 7 am open gates. Grange fair. Fire house. Greasy breakfast cart. Noon close.
Can we get like a 3 pm start time at a farmer’s market with snacks, kombucha, and chiptune DJ?
My reply was, “There’s nothing that I know of that stopping anyone from starting something new.” It wouldn’t be easy to do, but life’s not easy, right? Hackers take on difficult challenges because they are difficult, don’t they? So, let’s get to it.