I don’t really like criticizing the ARRL, but really, they just make it too easy. Whether it’s declining membership or finding specious reasons for disqualifying candidates for the board or the decision to charge extra for print magazines, it’s almost as if they decide to do whatever will garner the most harshest judgment. That, or they simply don’t care.
Witness the latest from Newington: the ARRL Student Coding Competition. We discuss this latest announcement in the next episode of the ICQ Podcast, due to be released on Sunday, December 28, but I’ll give you a little preview here. While we lauded the concept, there were still some aspects that we found wanting.
The first is the short duration of the competition. The competition is slated to begin on January 1, 2o26 and submissions are due on March 31, 2026. In fact, the web page warns, “Important: Don’t start yet! All rules and app specifications will be published on January 1, 2026.” I would submit that three months is just too short to develop anything of real value.
Of course, this may be what the ARRL wants. On their web page, they say that one of the objectives is to “get a mobile iOS app that ARRL can build on to offer to members, with appropriate attribution.” That sounds to me like:
- They’re expecting the submissions to be not ready for prime time.
- They’re planning to acquire the rights to the software submitted. I’d guess that this will be part of the submission process. That is to say that by entering the competition, competitors are giving up their rights to the software.
- The ARRL is hoping to be able to sell the app once they’ve taken the submission and developed it further. In other words, the League is planning to turn a profit on the work of the young participants.
There’s also the matter of the prize money. The news story says, “Cash awards totaling up to $25,000 will be presented to one or more winning entries.” There’s no detail on how that money will be awarded. They could give all $25,000 to the winner or give different amounts to different entries.
This comes from the Minutes of the ARRL Board of Directors Meeting, dated January 2024. It reads, “The CEO is encouraged to select a committee of judges from the membership to review each submission and identify one or more winning entries. The CEO shall award the winner(s) with an award, the total of all awards not to exceed $25,000.” Note that it took the HQ staff two years to come up with the rules for this competition.
Weird restrictions
There are also some weird restrictions. For example, submissions cannot contain, “Mainly Open Source code (scope TBD); must contain original work.” It seems to me that you’d want to encourage the use of open-source software, but, then again, if you’re planning to sell the final product, you don’t want the app to contain mostly open-source code.
You know, a year after letting my membership drop, I really want to re-join the ARRL. They have done good work in the past, and continue to do at least some good work currently – though that seems largely due to momentum and a back catalogue of publications.. But now after this coding contest announcement? Guess I’ll hold off another year and see what turns up.
I find the contest concept strange. Software is used in amateur radio, but it’s not really a core driving discipline. It seems like a really narrow focus, just software. If anything, ARRL should open the competition to anything that “advances the radio art.” That could be software, a novel circuit design, a new digital mode, etc.
The limitations are perplexing. No Python? Seriously? Python can be used for everything from scripting to full-blown cross-platform apps with GUIs. “Not mainly open source”? What’s that mean? Nearly all the software libraries developers use these days are open sourced.
If ARRL wants to sell an app, this is really a bad way to go about it. They should just vibe code a demo and take it to a software development firm for the “real” development, not use students to jump start it. If a student comes up with some really great, groundbreaking app, let them take the prize money and run with it themselves and reap the benefits and recognition for the amateur community. ARRL has a hideous record with managing information technology over the years. They’ve never quite understood open source software, and when it’s come to new technology standards they’ve either stood silent (digital voice, 802.11, proprietary vocoders) or made politically convenient decisions (Winlink).
If anything, this contest to me says “we’re totally out of ideas.”
Dan,
Nice column! I concur fully. This smacks of a Board rubber stamp for a CEO who says he was a software dev. As I write this, we are awaiting the arrival of family for lunch. On the TV, I just saw the often-run Schwab commercial about “Carl’s way” as the smug investment advisor foil for Schwab. The ARRL CEO may have been the source of this ad agency’s character, lol. Ham radio isn’t visible enough for this to actually be true but that’s what popped onto my head while reading your post.
Merry Christmas,
Frank
K4FMH
Mobile apps are generally non-trivial to write. High-quality, reliable apps, even more difficult.
Also I can say that pretty much any application these days contains a significant amount of open-source components. My expectation is that ARRL might be trying to avoid certain open-source licenses, e.g. GPL. If this is the case, they should specify that they are OK with more permissive licenses, like MIT or BSD.
Then there is the whole IOS vs. Android holy war. IOS has about 60% of the market right now, their plan will leave the other 40% out.
I consider this a bad idea and a waste of the membership’s money.
The timeline and rules framework are easy to work within for anyone with a modern understanding of how multi-platform apps and responsive multi-browser websites can be developed.
It is likely that the age group being targeted is savvy in this regard.
The approach: Vibe Coding.
General AI tools: CoPilot, Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude
A specific AI tool: Lovable
Mobile apps are developed in a few languages – Swift or Objective-C for iOS, and Java or Kotlin for Android. It’s preferred to use Swift and Kotlin for iOS and Android respectively. You can use third party frameworks for other languages. That gets clunky and messy.
The prohibition on open source software seems exactly because they want to keep it all closed up and locked up for monetization purposes . Some open source licenses will require all of the source code to be open source. Affero and GPLv3 are notorious for this. But I think they should open source it anyway. I don’t get why the league wants to keep everything closed up and locked up.
I’ve done mobile development in iOS. I also took a class in Android as part of my BS CS degree and I’m doing android dev now on a few side projects.
I think hackathons are terrible for developing new apps. They can contract this out easily and have it ready pretty quickly and professionally done.