Podcasts about international telecommunications union

Foundations of Amateur Radio Around the world are thousands of associations, groups of people, clubs if you like, that represent radio amateurs. Some of those associations are anointed with a special status, that of "member society" or "peak body", which allows them to represent their country with their own governments and on the international stage to the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union, through a global organisation, the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union. Some of these are known across our whole community, the ARRL in the USA, the RSGB in the UK, and the WIA in Australia. Some much less so, the CRAC, the Chinese Radio Amateurs Club, or the ARSI, the Amateur Radio Society of India, for example. In an attempt to get a deeper understanding of what distinguishes these organisations, I visited a dozen member society websites. Cultural sensibilities and aesthetics aside, the variety and sense of priority is both pleasing and astounding. Starting close to home, the WIA, the Wireless Institute of Australia, shows news as the most important and the top story is a radio contact between the International Space Station and a school, held about two weeks ago. The ERAU, the Estonian Radio Amateurs Association, features an article about the 2025 General Meeting outlining who was there, what was discussed and thanking the participants for their contributions. When I visited, the ARRL, the American Radio Relay League, top news item, was the renewed defence of the 902-928 MHz Amateur Radio Band, from a few days ago. The most important issue for the ARRL is that you read the latest edition of QST magazine, but only if you're a member. The RSGB, the Radio Society of Great Britain, has an odd landing page that links to the main site, which features much of the same content. The latest news is "Mental Health Awareness Week" and encourages us to celebrate kindness in our community. The DARC, the German Amateur Radio Club, has a page full of announcements and the top one was an article about current solar activity including a coronal hole and various solar flares. The ERASD, the Egyptian Radio Amateurs Society for Development, uses qsl.net as its main website. It features many images with text, presumably in Arabic, that unfortunately I was not able to translate. Curiously the landing page features some English text that welcomes all interested to join. I confess that I love the juxtaposition between a Yaesu FT-2000 transceiver and the images of Tutankhamun and the pyramids. The RAC, the Radio Amateurs of Canada, use their homepage to promote its purpose, and features many pictures of their bi-monthly magazine, which you can only read if you're a member, which is where many of the homepage links seem to go. The RCA, the Radio Club of Argentina, is promoting the 2024-2025 Railway Marathon, including links to descriptions of what constitutes a Railway Activation, how to reserve your station, and upcoming and past activations. There's also a reminder to renew your license. The ARSI, the Amateur Radio Society of India, has a very sparse landing page showing their mission and not much else. Clicking around gives you lots of information about the history, activities, awards and the like. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find out how to become licensed in India. There's hardly any images. In contrast, the URA, the Union of Radio Amateurs of Andorra, lands you on a page with contact details and not much else. Clicking through the site gives you lots of pictures of happy people and maps, lots of maps. The KARL, the Korean Amateur Radio League, features an announcement with a link to the 24th Amateur Radio Direction Finding, from a week ago, but it requires a login to actually read it. The JARL, the Japan Amateur Radio League, features an announcement to a form you can complete to join the "List of stations from which you do not wish to receive QSL cards." The NZART, the New Zealand Association of Radio Transmitters, features a big button to latest news and clicking on it shows the "Jock White Field Day", which was held several months ago. I wasn't able to see the CRAC, the Chinese Radio Amateurs Club, since the page didn't load for me. The "Wayback machine", also known as archive.org, from a capture a few days ago, showed a news item announcing the intent to organise the 1st Class C Amateur Radio Technical "something", I say "something" because I cannot actually load the article and see what it has to say. The event was scheduled for a month ago, the announcement was from several months ago. Content aside, finding sites was interesting too, mind you, there's plenty of member associations that don't have any web presence at all. Is that by choice, or necessity? The IARU list of member societies conflicts with the list of national organisations shown on Wikipedia. The IARU has about 160 entries, I say about, since the list isn't really formatted as much as it's congealed. Let's just say, perhaps a table for tabular data might be a novel approach. Wikipedia is slightly better formatted, it lists 93 national organisations. As it happens, both include a link to the national organisation for China, which is either the Chinese Radio Sports Association, with apparently two different acronyms, either CRSAOA, or CRSA, or if you believe the IARU as a source, it's the one I mentioned earlier, the CRAC. I don't know which one is right, but at least we can assume that the IARU page was updated formally, rather than edited by someone on the internet. Regardless of which one is the "real" Chinese national amateur radio organisation, none of the websites loaded for me. Let's move on. It's interesting that several non-English sites like Korea, Japan and Germany feature a button that allows their site to be translated into English. What's even more interesting is that the English version of the site is not in any way the same content. In many cases it appears to be information relevant to English visitors rather than a translation. One notable exception is Estonia, which allows a visitor to read their site in Estonian or English right out of the box. Unsurprisingly, the ARRL website has no buttons for Spanish, even though that represents about 13 percent of the USA population, let alone any other language. I'd encourage you to visit a few and see what you can learn about the other members of our community around the world. My visits leave me with questions. What do these organisations stand for? What do they do? Are they there for amateurs, for aspirant members, the general public, for regulators, for their members, for fund raising and advertising, or international visitors and tourism? It seems to me that looking at just a few of these organisations reveals a great many things about how they understand their own role and how they deliver service and just how much money they have to play with to make that happen. I'll leave you to ponder how effective they might be and what your role is in that endeavour. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

I'm John Maizels, Secretary of the Darling Downs Radio Club and it's Sunday 12th of January. If you're listening to this on Sunday morning and in range of the club's repeater VK4RDD on 146.75, then the regular 2M Net is at the top of the hour at 1000 local time. Pretty much that's the same time as the rest of Queensland, so if you're listening to this on Sunday evening then you've missed it. If you are around, then please join in with the gang any Sunday - you don't have to be a club member - and meet the locals. Also, something for which you don't have to be a member: our next club technical gathering is on Monday 10th of February when you can come and learn some ins and outs of Fox Hunting. You can read all about the meeting and Fox Hunting on our website right now - go to www.ddrci.org.au and check the calendar entries at the start... where you'll be reminded that we don't have a meeting in January. Hello, I'm Geoff Emery, VK4ZPP, and I've been thinking. As we move into a new calendar year it seems right to wonder what the direction of amateur radio is taking. There has been a tradition of maintaining practices which were foundational to the pursuit of AR. Over one hundred years ago, the wireless enthusiast was largely a home constructor. Morse code had been around for several years and its use in railway, shipping and military areas meant that it was the logical means of sending messages and conversing. Although patents existed for different voice modulation methods, the complexity of design and availability of components limited the uptake for the amateur experimenter. As the technology developed and was adopted around the world, it became necessary to find ways of harmonising the use of the radio spectrum. We see the current outcome of this in the International Telecommunications Union and the many subsidiary bodies that exist to facilitate various sectors. Part of the structure of radio administration has been to create a framework and then allow local authorities to care for the vast user base in a way that best suits local conditions. Our regulator seems to be a hands-off arm of government called the Australian Communications and Media Authority. If you wonder why I use that expression, consider trying to resolve an issue regarding your licence and finding you have no effective right of appeal to the Minister of Communications if you are dissatisfied with an outcome. It seems that part of the job description of the administrator of services is to ensure that the needs of their clients are adequately served. For we radio amateurs there are a few needs that are specific to our ability to utilise the full extent of our licences. For instance, we need to be able to corroborate or substantiate our qualification and licence grade to operate overseas or even register for certain internet applications involving the potential to transmit. The recent transfer of individual amateur licences to a class register has meant no access to an official database or, for many, a document that states the current status. Despite many attempts to remedy this situation with the Agency, it remains intransigent in its refusal to provide a simple and convenient solution. It is difficult to know the reasoning behind this situation, whether it is bureaucratic convenience, gross ignorance of the client base or poor external advice. Whatever the cause it is evident to those who need an entry on an official site or a piece of plastic or paper with the up-to-date information that this demonstrates a poor understanding of this part of the amateur service which the agency is charged with governing. In the scheme of things these are minor issues which require simple solutions and those solutions are being ignored. Let us hope to see a common-sense resolution to these transitional omissions this year. I'm Geoff Emery VK4ZPP and that's what I think….how about you?

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever attempted to download an email attachment, or watch a streaming service whilst your microwave was cooking lunch or dinner and noticed that something odd was happening, or is my asking that question the first time that you joined the dots? This phenomenon is not by accident, though it isn't on purpose. In 1947 the International Telecommunications Union, the ITU, was meeting in Atlantic City where the "delegate of the United States, referring to his request that the frequency 2450 Mc/s be allocated for I.S.M., indicated that there was in existence in the United States, and working on this frequency a diathermy machine and an electronic cooker, and that the latter might eventually be installed in transatlantic ships and airplanes. There was therefore some point in attempting to reach world agreement on this subject." Several things to unpack there. It's 1947 and experimentation is happening at 2,450 Mega-Cycles per second, what we call megahertz today; you might recognise the frequency as 2.45 GHz. At that time, experiments using radio frequencies for medical purposes has been in full swing for decades. Nikola Tesla wrote a paper on the subject that was presented in absentia to the American Electro Therapeutics Association in 1898. In 1947, a diathermy machine exists; today its used to aid with blood flow, muscle and joint pain as well as inflammatory and degenerative bone disease. There is a working electronic cooker, a microwave oven to you and I, and whilst the one you could buy in 1947, a Raytheon "Radarange", if you forked over $5,000, or $70,000 in today's money, had space for a 2 meter tall, 340 kilogram, 3 kilowatt behemoth, you have to admire the imagination that one day this would fit on an aeroplane to travel the world, let alone be available for $100 at your local supermarket. One other thing, I.S.M. or Industrial, Scientific and Medical is a concept we still use today. The idea being that there are uses for radio waves that are nothing to do with communication, like microwave ovens, steel smelting through induction heating, surgical uses like cauterising wounds, some cancer treatments and plenty more. One of the ideas behind ISM is that equipment operating in those frequencies must tolerate any interference generated by ISM applications. The other part of the ISM idea is that it's unlicensed, which is very attractive to people who experiment and why it became popular for other uses beyond heating your lunch. Consider that baby monitors, garage door openers, car security systems, video senders, cordless phones, wireless speakers and microphones, cordless keyboards and mice, radio controlled models, and smart power meters all share the same radio frequencies. Then there's Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee, also using the same 2.4 GHz ISM band. Yeah, even the two most popular network technologies on your phone and computer, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are competing with each other and the microwave oven in the kitchen. There are six global ISM bands and six additional ones with specific local requirements. Things like industrial microwave ovens, Near Field Communications or NFC and LoRaWan use frequencies like that. You'll also find satellite communications, radio location, CB radio, radio astronomers and radio amateurs on those bands. So, why are these technologies sharing the same frequencies? Essentially because they're unlicensed spectrum. Just so we're clear, this doesn't mean that it's unregulated spectrum. All it means is that unlike licensed spectrum, you don't need to buy access to the spectrum to use it, but you do need to have compliant equipment when you do. Compliance depends on local laws, location, band and power levels. So, next time you need to watch a movie whilst cooking lunch, eat an apple or go outside and get some daylight onto your skin instead. A quick word on power. Whilst all these uses share the same frequency band, their human impact varies considerably. A Wi-Fi network uses a tenth of a Watt. A diathermy machine uses 250 Watts and produces a "gentle heat" at the surface of the skin, suitable for treatment. Contained inside a metal box, a microwave oven uses 1,000 Watts or more. Even that doesn't cook food from the inside out, instead it vibrates water molecules in the food, which heat up, which in turn cooks the food. It doesn't penetrate very far and doesn't work on frozen water, which is why you need to defrost your food before you can cook it. It's also why when you stand between your Wi-Fi router and the computer things slow down, or why your hand position on your phone or tablet can make a difference, since your body, made from 60% water, is blocking the signal. Finally, here's something to consider. A licensed radio amateur has access to some ISM bands, but does it require an amateur license to actually use any of those bands? In other words, if my amateur license doesn't permit my access to 2.4 or 5.8 GHz bands, can I legally use a transmitter in the unlicensed spectrum that is the ISM band on those frequencies? If you answered yes, and you're considering experimenting on the ISM bands, you'll find the Low Frequency Experimental Radio or LowFER, MedFER and HiFER community has already beaten you to it. Within the ISM regulations are provisions for all kinds of other experiments, generally using low power, sometimes a Watt, sometimes less, but you already know that my 10 mW beacon on the 10m band has been heard 13,945 km away, so there's plenty of opportunities to play. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

While in Geneva, I paid a visit to the U.S. Permanent Mission to interview Ambassador Bathsheba Crocker. She is the top U.S. official in Geneva, representing the United States at the many United Nations agencies and international organizations headquartered here. I wanted to speak with Ambassador Crocker because the work of the UN in Geneva can sometimes fly under the radar, yet it directly impacts everyone on the planet, including Americans. I was interested in learning more about how the U.S. engages with agencies that most Americans have probably never heard of—such as the World Intellectual Property Organization or the International Telecommunications Union—but that nonetheless help to shape our world in ways that affect the daily lives of ordinary people. We start by discussing how the U.S. engages with some of the more technical UN agencies in Geneva, and then move on to the Biden administration's decision to rejoin the Human Rights Council after the previous Trump administration withdrew. We also discuss the relationship between the work of the UN here in Geneva and the UN in New York, particularly in relation to issues of peace and security.  

Foundations of Amateur Radio The International Amateur Radio Union or IARU, is the governing body of our community. It represents us on the world stage through the International Telecommunications Union, the ITU. As I've discussed before, it consists of four separate organisations working together, the International Amateur Radio Union, the global body, and three regional ones, Region 1, 2 and 3, each representing the hobby of amateur radio. Previously I've looked at the constitution of the IARU to get a sense of its purpose in the world. At the time I mentioned the notion of comparing the four organisations against each other, since ostensibly they're doing the same thing for a different part of the world. Each of these regional bodies was created separately by different groups of people and their constitutions reflect that. The Global IARU constitution, last updated in 1989 consists of nine pages. The IARU Region 1 constitution, with proposed amendments from 2020 has 31 pages, the English version of the Region 2 constitution, since there's also a Spanish one, was amended in 2019 has six pages including two copies of Article 2, and refers regularly to the Global IARU constitution and finally, Region 3, amended in 2012 has 15 pages. What is striking at first glance is just how poorly these documents are constructed. Formatting, inconsistent spelling, indentation, general layout and all are lacking attention to detail. I think that this reflects poorly on the internal workings of the IARU, but I digress. Curiously, the Region 3 website has a whole section on proposed changes to the constitution. Many of those changes are around the election of officials and voting procedures. It also includes the use of modern communications like email and remote conference facilities on internet platforms. One paragraph stood out: "It was also realised that changes would need to be made to formally recognise that we will (as happened at the online conference in 2021) have females as well as males taking responsible positions in IARU Region 3." It must have come as quite a shock to the delegates to learn that there are females in our hobby. This must have already happened in Region 1, since there is a reference to "he/she" in relation to being elected. Mind you, use of the word "they" must not have occurred to the authors. But don't worry, we shouldn't rush these things, the International body and the Region 2 constitutions both use "he" for roles. I will point out that the International body has a weasel clause where it states, among other things, "words importing only the masculine gender include the feminine gender and the neutral gender". It's a good start, but falls short of standards expected today. If you're not sure what all the fuss is about, let me illustrate: "The term of office of the President shall be for a period of five years from the date of ratification of porcupine nomination, and porcupine shall remain in office until the nomination of porcupine successor has been ratified." If that felt jarring for you, you might get some sense of what it feels like for someone reading that with gender pronouns that don't match the text. A better solution would be: "The term of office of the President shall be for a period of five years from the date of ratification of their nomination, and they shall remain in office until the nomination of their successor has been ratified." It's not the first time we've struck this type of issue. It's high time that we did something about it. Over a year ago, I pointed out that OM, Old Man, and XYL, eX Young Lady, were derogatory and we should replace them with OP, operator, and SO, significant other. A year before that I proposed a revision of the Amateur's Code to make its language inclusive and reflective of the wider community in which we operate. I've had discussions with people who identify across the gender spectrum about much of this and the overwhelming feedback I received is that our community is Old White Men clamouring to grow the hobby without a clue that the words they use are part of the problem. So, credit to Region 1 for implementing some of this and to Region 3 for starting this conversation. I don't doubt that there are members in the Global IARU and Region 2 who would like to see this implemented and to you I say: It's time, high time, to review what language our community uses to identify itself to the wider community. More generally, as the governing and representative global bodies you should be leading the way and providing guidance to the member societies. So, next time you promote our community, refer to others, link to articles, and attempt to encourage participation, you should take a moment and ask yourself if what you're saying is truly speaking to people who are not Old White Men and if that's the case, what you might do to embrace the wider community. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Can we keep up with AI? Paul Foster, CEO of the Esports Federation, dives into the legal implications of artificial intelligence. Gamers have a unique familiarity with artificial intel. Explore how AI is transforming game design, content creation, brand promotion and much more. Along with entertainment/media lawyer Bryan Tan of Reed Smith's Singapore office, Foster discusses the unique ways AI is enabling gamers to monetize their skills.  ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Hello and welcome to Tech Law Talks, a podcast brought to you by Reed Smith's Emerging Technologies Group. In each episode of this podcast, we will discuss cutting-edge issues on technology, data, and the law. We will provide practical observations on a wide variety of technology and data topics to give you quick and actionable tips to address the issues you are dealing with every day.  Bryan: Welcome to Tech Law Talks and our new series on artificial intelligence. Over the coming months, we'll explore the key challenges and opportunities with the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Today, we will focus on AI in the interesting world of esports. And we have together with us today, Mr. Paul Foster, who is the CEO of the Global Esports Federation. Good morning, Paul.  Paul: Good evening, Bryan. It's nice to be with you, coming from California.  Bryan: And I'm coming to you from Singapore, but we are all connected in one world. Today, we are here to talk about AI and esports. But before we start, I wanted to talk about you and to share what you were doing before AI and how that has changed after AI has now become a big thing.  Paul: Thanks, Bryan. Yeah. So I come from originally from Sydney, Australia, and I was from my background is really 20 years in the Olympic movement. So I started at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. So I started about three years before the Olympics, worked for the Olympics for about 20 years, so traditional sports, and then moved to esports and opened or founded the Global Esports Federation in 2019. And of course, we all know what happened four months after that, Bryan, with COVID and the pandemic that really closed a lot of traditional sport. And so esports really took off. So it's definitely been a very, very exciting and accelerating journey these last couple of years.  Bryan: Great. So you've kind of gotten into esports after a background in sports. And it's interesting you mentioned 2019 because we also know that somewhere around 2022, the end of 2022, just as the pandemic was sorting itself out. Artificial intelligence, primarily generative artificial intelligence, then began to capture the imagination of people. And the question here, I guess, is maybe we're talking to converted, but esports is obviously one of the most technologically advanced and clued in online ecosystems, communities. How has artificial intelligence impacted esports and is that a positive or negative thing?  Paul: You're absolutely right, Bryan. I think one of the things that I like to say is that we're living in what I consider to be one of the most exciting times in the history of humanity. The reason I say that is because of the convergence of all these incredibly powerful technologies at exactly the same time, at the very early dawn of AI. AI and I think it's something that we should reflect on because I think many people talk about AI as if we're already in the middle of the cycle and I think my position is that we're at the very early dawn, maybe even the pre-dawn of AI. I did some postgraduate studies in machine learning and AI so it's a passion project of mine, something I'd love to think about and I was recently at the global summit on AI with the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva and had a chance to sit with the leaders group. There was 30,000 people attending, Bryan, which is a big number of people showing the interest from all over the world. But there was a leaders group convened to look at policymaking. And in a sense, there was this feeling that industry has been rapidly growing and expanding almost at a pace or a cadence that is hard to sort of register in a sense. And then policymakers and particularly governments and others are trying to sort of catch up in a sense and and try to get in front of that. As you know Bryan we're very strong partners with UNESCO, the United Nations Education Science and Cultural Organization, as well as the international telecommunications union so we're also contributing to their thinking and bringing our community into the discussion one of the things that could be interesting for our listeners is that it's true what Bryan said is that our community, which is roughly in the range of 18 to 34-year-olds, are early adopters of technology. And one of the things that might be interesting is that gamers and people who play electronic sports and games have always been exposed to artificial intelligence in some form, even very, very early form. And so it's not a surprise to me that the adoption of of artificial intelligence and the interest in artificial intelligence in some ways has been really accepted by the esports community in the gaming community and as you also said Bryan you know this this demographic 18 to 34 is really the heart of what we call Gen Z or Gen and then now we're seeing Gen Alpha of course the next generation starting high school but what we also call this and some people widely call this generation is actually Gen T. Generation around around technologies and the early acceptance of that. And I can talk a little bit more about some of the applications for esports if that's interesting.  Bryan: No, I think that's interesting. And I think in particular, I think what will be interesting to hear is some of your own visions about what the future of AI and esports could be like. What does it promise to the esports community? What can they kind of look forward to? How do you see that going?  Paul: Yeah I think thanks for the question I think that it's um again I think there's the the possibilities are limitless and we're really at the beginning the early time about this and when I speak for example recently to colleagues and friends at companies such as open ai and others that I speak to every day there's a true interest around this particularly around the the creative economy and how we'll create games in the future and there's three things Bryan that I thought I'd mentioned, which is really the use of AI in terms of teams and players' preparation, the fact that we can have quicker and more efficient, I call it, you know, one of the great benefits, one of the things I've learned in my studies is that it needs to be human-focused and human-centric. And we're also, at the Global League Sports Federation, we support the UNESCO's position on the creation of ethical AI. And what that really talks about is human-focused because it's human-centered. And so one of the things I think is really interesting for our community is that they'll have quicker access to statistics, to analytics, to data. So they'll be able to, if you think about esports as a competitive sport or as a competitive event, any preparation that you can have to prepare you to have better results and better preparation will ultimately, should ultimately provide for a better outcome for you as a competitor, right? So that's number one. The second thing is that really what we can do for the creative economy, which is absolutely fascinating, Bryan, in esports, the whole economy around or the whole community around creators and content creators and people that really bring esports and bring it alive. Is that we'll be able to have automatically created clips and reels and analytics. So in real time, things like in pre-AI, we would have had to wait for editing, Bryan. We would have had to wait for editing. it might have taken hours or days and now that can happen in seconds so for and so that's fascinating and then the third thing so team preparation creative economy and then the third thing really talks around the economics of gaming and around sponsorship and value-based identity so that in the future our sponsors and our partners that are so important for the thriving nation and the the sustainability of gaming and esports will also be able to use AI to have greater analytics and greater awareness of their brand values, to actually understand the value of their brand. A very simple example is we can use AI to track how many times a certain brand was visible on a jersey or in an audience. We'll be able to use AI to actually track it in real time. Whereas again, Bryan, in the past, we would have had to look through video files and actually count it manually. And I remember doing that. I mean, another example I'll give you is I remember but not that long ago in my work at the Olympic Games, I literally remember installing what we used to call video walls. So walls of not even a video screen, but 12 video screens or 16, I think they were, 4x4 screens to be able to look at every venue at once. And when I think about that now, that seems like a long time ago, but it wasn't a long time ago. I mean, within the last 10 or 12 years, that was still our reality. And now we can use AI to capture that data, to give us the same results in real time across teams, across creators and across partners.  Bryan: Okay, thank you for that. I think three very concrete areas that we can look forward to as an esports community. Interestingly, you also mentioned the regulators, the governments trying to keep in touch with the development of AI. Yes. And it sounded as if it was a bit of a struggle for them. Do you think there are any big concerns about the deployment of AI esports that we should be kind of aware of and maybe try to avoid?  Paul: Yeah, I think it's really this notion about catching up, right? How do you catch up with something that's evolving every day and every hour of every day at a speed that's really difficult to contain? And also two schools of thought, really, which is one school of thought, which I remember, Bryan, I think Sam Altman from OpenAI recently said it. And he said, look, we're so busy and this is running so fast and so powerful, we'll come back and we'll get back to that later. Like we're off, you know, creating these incredibly strong and powerful platforms. We'll have to come back to those matters at a later stage. And it was interesting because when I was last couple of weeks ago in Geneva, you had policymakers, governments, ministers, etc., whose role was to make sure that the frameworks were established around implementing the framework on ethical AI. Were really struggling with this reality of being able to just, I mean, literally physically struggling with this reality of trying to get ahead of the knowledge, not only the knowledge, but also the policy work that needed to be put in place, the frameworks, the regulations, and then rolling that out across industry. At the same time, you have technology firms and particularly firms with specialization in AI, and you've seen the incredible value chain skyrocketing in recent months, really racing ahead. And yet you've got policymakers trying to get their hands around this and trying to even understand it. You've got the same challenges in academia, don't you, Bryan, with academia also trying to create curricula that by the time it's published, we may already be behind the eight ball in terms of where AI has taken us. So I think the thing that I would talk about is the concern I would have is the ethical side of AI because, you know, and keeping it human focused and in the best interest of humanity, meaning that really what the benefits are, the focus of benefits should be around making our lives more efficient, effective and more equitable. And there is a risk of course within AI that it can because of prejudice that is potentially built into the ai itself that it could continue to manifest that across the community and that's something that's difficult to get ahead of unless it's created with that lens at the very beginning.  Bryan: No i think that's that's absolutely correct it's uh it's a good reminder that this is technology we're dealing with, and technology can be something that's used for the good of humanity, but it can also be abused. And we have to keep in mind that the technology is there only for the benefit of mankind, like you said, and to keep that human centricity always in focus as AI is applied to esports. Okay, so last question, I promise you, Paul, as CEO of Global Esports Federation, what would you wish for the future of esports? And maybe just to make it interesting, on two spectrums, one, a more realistic expectation, and the second one, a moonshot. If your wish can be granted, what would your wish for esports be?  Paul: What a great question. Thanks, Bryan. I love that opportunity. Well, Well, the thing that's so interesting in esports and gaming is that anything that was a moonshot about two weeks ago is now already a reality. It moves so fast. So when you were mentioning a moonshot, I was thinking about the Olympics. And I'll talk about that in a moment because that would have been considered a moonshot just a few months ago, if not years ago. But what I think the future is, is the globalization of esports as a source of incredibly inclusive, powerful, evocative entertainment, right? So just as you have traditional sport and just as you have, for example, in the United States, you have the proliferation of leagues and professional sports. It's coming into view that you'll have very significant value and be able to really create a very sustainable living as an economic means through esports. Not only as a player winning significant prize money, but also as a content creator, as a game developer, as a marketeer, as an event organizer, as an academic. There's tons of opportunities. opportunities and in fact Bryan I was speaking with some friends of mine who are attorneys actually and it surprises me because traditionally I would talk to attorneys and then through conversation it comes out that they're really passionate about gaming and now maybe they specialize around being with illegal expertise in terms of intellectual property rights or different aspects of it and this also I wanted to share that with you Bryan because I thought that was interesting that even in a traditional professional, such as the practice of law. There's now a lot of interest in this field as well. What does that mean? That means that we get to manifest our lives how we wish them to be manifested. In the past, if I wanted to go into event management, I would have to do a certain angle. Now I can do that with inside esports. If I wanted to be in communications and global media, I might have had to do that in public relations, or in traditional luxury goods, for example, or consumer products. Now I can do it inside esports. So I think the future is extremely bright and relatively limitless in terms of being able to manifest my career, finding something I want to do in my profession, my skills, but be able to do it in something that I love doing. And that's a blessing, I think, Bryan, that very few of us, so you and I, that has happened in our lifetime, that we're able to actually have the life that we want, create professional professional conditions we want, earn a living of that by doing it in that field that we love. The moonshot which you've challenged me on, I was so proud having come from the Olympic movement in my hometown of Sydney and now seeing the reality of the Olympic eSports Games, which was just announced by the IOC a couple of weeks ago and then rapidly evolving. And how interesting is this? At the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, it seems that we'll see an announcement of the Olympic eSports Games itself, agreed by the IOC, confirmed by the IOC. And so one of the things i think is fascinating if you think about Olympic sport traditional sport, it took golf 121 years to come back onto the Olympic program and esports in global esports federation was as you said Bryan, founded in 2019 here we are just four years later not only is it inside the Olympic movement but there's actually a separate IP created called Olympic esports games. If we think about that for a moment, the IOC traditionally had their Olympic Games as their main IP. Yes, Winter Games. Yes, Youth Games. But now we have the Olympic Esports Games as a separate IP. And what's even interesting at the recent press release I read is that it said a whole new division, a whole new structure will be created at the IOC. Rather than trying to fit it into traditional models, a whole new structure will be created. it. So this was a moonshot. And I think that this will be fascinating in terms of how we see that evolve and how you see a traditional sports organization just a couple of years ago, really being a long way away from today. And in those very short years with the Global Esports Federation staging our Commonwealth Esports Championships, the European Esports Championships, the Pan American Esports Championships, and now seeing the evolution at the Olympic Esports Games, What an incredible opportunity that is for athletes, creators and community right around the world.  Bryan: Thank you for sharing that. And I think that's a great statement to make that what was yesterday's moonshot is today's reality in a fast-paced world that evolves because of technology. Thank you again for sharing with us your thoughts, Paul. I think it's been greatly exciting. We look forward to a great future in esports. And once again, thank you for joining us in this series.  Paul: Thank you, Bryan. Thanks very much, everyone.  Outro: Tech Law Talks is a Reed Smith production. Our producers are Ali McCardell and Shannon Ryan. For more information about Reed Smith's emerging technologies practice, please email techlawtalks@reedsmith.com. You can find our podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, reedsmith.com, and our social media accounts.  Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to establish an attorney-client relationship, nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Any views, opinions, or comments made by any external guest speaker are not to be attributed to Reed Smith LLP or its individual lawyers.  All rights reserved. Transcript is auto-generated.

In this podcast series, we speak with friends of SSPI who recently made big executive moves. We'll find out what they're doing now and what they hope to achieve in their new roles in the industry. In episode 1, SSPI Director of Engagement Tamara Bond-Williams speaks with Jennifer Manner, Senior Advisor for Space and Satellite Policy at the Office of Spectrum Management in the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Jennifer A. Manner is the Senior Advisor for Space and Satellite Policy at the Office of Spectrum Management in the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). In this role, Jennifer is the principle advisor to NTIA on spectrum management issues related to space and satellite communications. Prior to joining NTIA, Ms. Manner served as Senior Vice President, Regulatory Affairs at EchoStar Corporation, Deputy Chief of the Office of Engineering and Technology, as well as the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Jennifer has also held senior positions at the FCC and in industry, including at MCI/WorldCom (not Verizon) and Skyterra (now Ligado). Jennifer has held leadership roles in a number of organizations including the Global Satellite Operators Association, the Satellite Industry Association, and the U.S. ITU Association. Jennifer has also held leadership positions in a number of U.S. government advisory committees including Chair, Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee and Vice Chair of the FCC's World Radiocommunications Advisory Committee and the Commerce Department's International Trade Advisory Committee. Jennifer also holds leadership positions at the International Telecommunications Union. Further, Jennifer served for over a decade as a professor of law at Georgetown University Law School teaching international telecommunications law, and continues to teach at Carnegie Mellon's Executive Education Program in Technology Policy and the Silicon Flatirons Program at UC Boulder. Jennifer is also an author of numerous articles and several books on spectrum and telecommunications including Spectrum Wars: The Rise of 5G and Beyond (Artech House 2021). Jennifer is currently working on her latest book, Spectrum Wars: A New Hope for Connectivity (expected release 2025). Jennifer is also a filmmaker, with her latest film, When Wire Was King: The Transformation of Telecommunications is available on PBS, as well as Amazon and AppleTV and other streaming platforms. Jennifer holds a B.A. in Political Science and Theater from the State University of New York at Albany, a J.D. cum laude from New York Law School and a LL.M. with honors from Georgetown University Law School. Jennifer lives in Bethesda, MD with her husband, Dr. Eric Glasgow, and her golden doodle, Charliedoodle.

Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the past week I've been attempting to work out what the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union, actually does and how it works. I started looking into this because the IARU is this year celebrating a century since its foundation in 1925. You might think of the IARU as one organisation, but behind the scenes there are actually four, one for each so-called "Region" as well a Global organisation called the International Secretariat, headquartered at the ARRL in Connecticut. The Regions have been negotiated by members of the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union. As early as 1927 the ITU documented differences in frequency allocations between Europe and Other Regions. In Cairo in 1938 it defined boundaries for Europe. In Atlantic City in 1947, the ITU defined three Regions, with specific boundaries, essentially, Europe and Africa, the Americas and the rest of the world. As a surprise to nobody, this is purely a political decision, especially since radio waves don't get to have a passport and pass border control. The impact of this continues today, generations later. We still have this patchwork of frequency allocations, we still have exclusions, different band-edges and other anachronisms. The Regions are further divided into Zones. When you start looking at the ITU zone map in detail it gets weird. For example, Iraq is in Region 1, neighbouring Iran has been specifically excluded from Region 1 and moved to Region 3. In case you're curious, Iran has been represented at the ITU since 1938. Antarctica is part of seven of the 90 ITU zones and all three Regions, because of course it is. Zone 90, jammed between zones 35, 45, 61, 64, 65 and 76, almost as an afterthought, contains one landmass, Minamitorishima, an island that sticks 9 m above the water, has a 6 km coastline and is generally off-limits to the general public. The nearest land in any direction is over 1,000 km away. It's got an IOTA, Islands On The Air, designation, OC-073 and despite its isolation, has been activated by radio amateurs using JD1 prefix callsigns. I live in Australia, ITU zone 58, part of Region 3, together with the two most populous countries on the planet, India and China and the rest of eastern Asia, but not the Former Soviet republics and most, but not all of Oceania, you know, because .. logic. From a population perspective Region 3 is the largest by several orders of magnitude, but you'd never know it if you went looking. Why am I telling you all this? Well, that's the international stage on which the IARU is representing amateur radio. In 1927 the underlying assumption was that each service, Amateur Radio included, had a global exclusive allocation. The reality was different. Spectrum was in such short supply that individual exceptions were carved out, which as I've said resulted in splitting up the world into regions, starting in 1938 and codified in 1947. The IARU in 1925 is a different organisation from what it is today. In 1925 individual amateurs could become members. As soon as enough members from a country joined, they'd be grouped together. When there were enough groups, the IARU became a federation of national associations. Over time, the IARU as a single body, evolved into the structure we have today. In 1950 in Paris, the IARU Region 1 organisation was formed. In 1964 in Mexico City, IARU Region 2 was created and in 1968 in Sydney, IARU Region 3 came to exist. You can see their online presence at the various iaru.org websites. How it works is no clearer now than it was when I started. What it has achieved is equally unclear. I'm currently trolling through ITU World Radiocommunications Conference documentation going back to 1903 to discover references to Amateur Radio, but it's hard going. At least it's something. The IARU documentation is not nearly as extensive or up to date. It appears that many, if not all, of the people working behind the scenes at the various IARU organisations are volunteers. If you feel inclined, there is an ongoing request for assistance, and before you ask, yes, I looked into helping out, but that will have to wait until funds permit. If you have insights into the functioning of the IARU, don't be shy, get in touch. cq@vk6flab.com is my address. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

On the version of Hot off the Wire posted March 21 at 6 a.m. CT: WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal Reserve officials signaled that they still expect to cut their key interest rate three times in 2024 despite signs that inflation was surprisingly high at the start of the year. Yet they foresee fewer rate cuts in 2025, and they slightly raised their inflation forecasts. The policymakers forecast that stronger growth and inflation above their 2% target level would persist into next year. As a result, they suggested that interest rates would have to stay slightly higher for longer. Chair Jerome Powell noted that inflation has cooled considerably from its peak. But, he added, “inflation is still too high, ongoing progress in bringing it down is not assured and the path forward is uncertain.” CHANDLER, Arizona (AP) — President Joe Biden is celebrating an agreement to provide Intel with up to $8.5 billion in direct funding and $11 billion in loans for computer chip plants around the country. Biden talked up the investment in the political battleground state of Arizona and called it a way of “bringing the future back to America.” The funding will support computer chip plants in Arizona, Ohio, New Mexico and Oregon. It's a cash infusion the government says should help the U.S. boost its global share of advanced chip production from zero to 20%. The Democratic president often says not enough voters know about his economic policies and they'd support him if they did. WASHINGTON (AP) — The House impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden is grinding on but next steps are uncertain. Without strong support from within the Republican ranks to impeach the president, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee has signaled an interest in another direction. Republicans have yet to find hard evidence of presidential wrongdoing by Biden. But Rep. James Comer pushed ahead at Wednesday’s hearing as he's eyeing potential criminal referrals of alleged Biden family wrongdoing to the Justice Department. It would be a largely symbolic step, but would potentially open the door to prosecutions by a future administration. But the president's son Hunter Biden declined to appear after having testified privately in a deposition earlier this month. ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — The Minnesota Department of Corrections has penalized a county jail for depriving an inmate of food and water for more than two days as punishment after he smeared feces in his cell and refused to clean it up. The department ordered that the Otter Tail County Jail in Fergus Falls must transfer all of its current inmates to new facilities by the close of business Thursday. The jail can keep new inmates no more than 72 hours, excluding holidays and weekends, until the state approves. Sheriff Barry Fitzgibbons expressed regret Wednesday and said his staff will follow the state’s orders. HAMBURG, N.Y. (AP) — The owner of an 34-year-old alligator seized by conservation officers near Buffalo is fighting for its return. Tony Cavallaro says the reptile he named Albert is a gentle giant he treated like family and who lived in a custom addition in his house. Officers a week ago sedated and seized the more than 11-foot, 750-pound alligator. State environmental officials say Cavallaro’s license to keep Albert had expired in 2021, and that he'd let children and others pet him, which is illegal. Cavallaro says he's received an outpouring of support for the alligator's return. The billionaire philanthropist and author MacKenzie Scott announced Tuesday she would give $640 million to more than 360 organizations in response to an application process she launched last year. The award is more than double the amount that she initially promised in an open call for applications. The selected organizations will receive grants of $2 million or $1 million. Previously, Scott and her team have selected organizations and provided them with large, unrestricted gifts. Scott has shaken up philanthropic giving since 2019 when she began giving away the fortune she came into after divorcing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. NEW YORK (AP) — The American Kennel Club says French bulldogs are still the United States’ most commonly registered purebreds. The new standings were released Wednesday. Some say they make Frenchies the nation’s most popular canine. But is it a coup to be celebrated? Longtime fans say au contraire. They worry about what popularity is doing to the breed. The rankings are derived from puppies and other dogs that were added to the AKC's registry last year. The club is the United States’ oldest dog registry. After Frenchies, the most common AKC breeds were Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers, German shepherds and poodles. NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — U.N. agencies have warned that waste from electronics is piling up worldwide while recycling rates remain low and are likely to fall even further. The agencies are referring to “e-waste,” which is defined as discarded devices with a plug or battery, including cellphones, electronic toys, TVs, microwave ovens, e-cigarettes, laptop computers and solar panels. It does not include waste from electronic vehicles. In a new report released Wednesday, the U.N.’s International Telecommunications Union and research arm UNITAR said nearly 62 million tons of “e-waste” was generated in 2022. They said some contained hazardous elements like mercury, as well as rare Earth metals coveted by tech companies. It’s on track to reach 82 million tons by 2030. OSO, Wash. (AP) — Friday marks 10 years since the side of a mountain collapsed, raced across a river and buried an entire neighborhood in rural Washington state, killing 43 people in the nation’s worst landslide disaster. Since then, young alder trees have colonized the scarred landscape and a new memorial offers perspective on the scope of the loss. The federal government has advanced a national strategy for researching and understanding the dangers landslides pose. But the sort of trauma that engulfed Oso after the slide struck on March 22, 2014, is likely to afflict more and more people as climate change intensifies storms and catastrophic wildfires, destabilizing soil and increasing risk. Major League Baseball has its curtain raiser, the NCAA basketball tournament is now at 64 teams, eight games are on the NBA schedule and three games are on the NHL slate. —The Associated Press About this program Host Terry Lipshetz is managing editor of the national newsroom for Lee Enterprises. Besides producing the daily Hot off the Wire news podcast, Terry conducts periodic interviews for this Behind the Headlines program, co-hosts the Streamed & Screened movies and television program and is the former producer of Across the Sky, a podcast dedicated to weather and climate. Lee Enterprises produces many national, regional and sports podcasts. Learn more here.

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'm going to spend a little longer with you than usual, but then, I think this is important and it's good to end the year on a bang. Have you ever attempted to make contact with a specific DXCC entity and spent some time exploring the band plan to discover what the best frequency might be to achieve that? If you got right into it, you might have gone so far as to attempt to locate the band plan that applies to your particular target. If you have, what I'm about to discuss will not come as a surprise. If not, strap yourself in. When you get your license you're hopefully presented with a current band plan that is relevant to your license conditions. It shows what frequencies are available to you, which modes you can use where, and what power levels and bandwidth are permitted. It should also show you if you're the primary user or not on a particular band. If you're not sure what that means, some frequency ranges are allocated to multiple users and amateur radio as one such user is expected to share. If you're a primary user you have priority, but if you're not, you need to give way to other traffic. It should come as no surprise that this is heavily regulated but as a surprise to some, it changes regularly. Across the world, frequency allocation is coordinated by the International Telecommunications Union, the ITU, and specifically for amateur radio, by the International Amateur Radio Union, the IARU. It coordinates frequencies with each peak amateur radio body. The ITU divides the world into three regions, Region 1, 2 and 3, each with its own band plan. Within each region, a country has the ability to allocate frequencies as it sees fit - presumably as long as it complies with the ITU requirements. As a result, there's not one single picture of how frequencies are allocated. And this is where the fun starts. In Australia there's an official legislated band plan, cunningly titled F2021L00617. It contains the frequencies for all the radio spectrum users as well as a column for each ITU region. The document is 200 pages long, and comes with an astounding array of footnotes and exclusions. It's dated 21 May 2021. There's a simplified version published by the Wireless Institute of Australia, which comes as a 32 page PDF. It was last updated in September 2020. When I say "simplified", I'm of course kidding. It doesn't include the 60m band which according to the regulator is actually an amateur band today. The 13cm band according to the WIA shows a gap between 2302 and 2400, where the regulator shows it as a continuous allocation between 2300 and 2450 MHz. The point being, who's right? What can you actually use? Oh, the WIA does have a different page that shows that 6m "has had some additions", but they haven't bothered to update their actual band plan. To make life easier, the regulator includes helpful footnotes like "AUS87". This is particularly useful if you want to search their PDF to determine what this actually says, since it only appears 156 times and it's not a link within the document. In case you're curious, it's related to three radio astronomy facilities operated by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, better known as the CSIRO, two by the University of Tasmania and one by the Canberra Deep Space Network. Interestingly the Australian Square Kilometer Array and the Murchison Widefield Array don't feature in those particular exclusions, they're covered by footnote AUS103. If that wasn't enough. The regulator has no time for specific amateur use. You can find the word Amateur 204 times but there's no differentiation between the different classes of license which means that you need to go back to the WIA document to figure out which license class is allowed where, which of course means that you end up in no-mans land if you want to discover who is permitted to transmit on 2350 MHz. If we look further afield, in the USA the ARRL publishes half a dozen different versions, each with different colours, since black and white, grey scale, colour and web-colour are all important attributes to differentiate an official document. Of course, those versions are now all six years out of date, having been revised on the 22nd of September 2017. The most recent version, in a completely different format, only in one colour, has all the relevant information. It shows a revised date of 10 February 2023, that or, 2 October 2023 because of course nobody outside the US is ever going to want to refer to that document - seeing as there's only amateurs in the USA, well at least according to the ARRL. Interestingly the US Department of Commerce, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Office of Spectrum Management publishes a colourful chart showing the radio spectrum between 3 kHz and 300 GHz. You can't use it as a technical document, but it's pretty on a wall to amaze your non-amateur friends. The FCC has a band plan page, but I couldn't discover how to actually get amateur relevant information from it. If you think that's bad, you haven't seen anything yet. The British are special. The RSGB publishes a variety of versions, each worse than the next. It appears that their system creates a single HTML page for each band, their 32 page PDF is a print out of that and their interactive viewer wraps all that into some proprietary system that makes using it an abysmal experience. Fortunately, they also link to a band plan made by the regulator, presented as a five page PDF which is much more concise and has the helpful heading: "The following band plan is largely based on that agreed at IARU Region 1 General Conferences, with some local differences on frequencies above 430MHz." Unfortunately it doesn't specify which particular General Conferences apply, but it does helpfully tell us that it's effective from the first of January 2023, unless otherwise shown. That said, 2023 only appears in the headers and footers and 2024 doesn't appear, so who knows what date exceptions exist. One point of difference is that the RSGB also publishes their band plan as an Excel Workbook. This might start your heart beating a little faster with visions of data entry, sorting, filtering and other such goodies, like figuring out which frequency to use for a particular mode. Unfortunately the authors have used Excel as a tool for making tables like you'd see in a word processing document. Start and Stop frequencies in the same cell, random use of MHz, spacing between bandwidth and frequencies and descriptions intermingled. In other words, this is not an Excel Workbook and it does not contain information in any usable form, unless you want to do some free text searching across the 32 worksheets - what is it with 32 anyway? Perhaps this is their authoring tool and they save as HTML from within Excel or print to PDF. Who knows? One point that the British do get right is version control. You can see specifically what change was introduced when. For example, on the 6th of March 2009 the 17m QRP frequency was corrected to 18086 kHz. Mind you, there's several pages of updates, helpfully scattered across multiple worksheets. Yes, they're really using Excel as a word processor. Before I dig into any other countries, I should mention the United Nations Amateur Radio peak body, the IARU, presumably a model that countries should aspire to. The IARU has links to three different sets of band plans. Region 1 breaks the band plan into HF and higher frequencies and the higher frequencies are broken into notional bands, each with their own PDF. Regions 2 and 3 each provide a single PDF, but the Region 3 document is hosted on the Region 2 website. Region 1 documents contain a revision and an active date as well as an author. Region 2 and 3 documents contain a date and are formatted completely differently. In Germany the DARC attempts to link to the IARU-Region 1 band plan, but the link is pointing at a non-existent page. In the Netherlands, VERON points at a 2016 edition of the IARU-Region 1 HF band plan and the current Region 1 mixed band plan for higher frequencies. In Canada the RAC points at a HTML page for each band and presents all the HF frequencies as a single image, yes an image. All the other bands are essentially text describing how to use a particular band. The HF image states that it applies from the first of June 2023, the rest of the pages carry various dates that conflict with each other. For example, the 2m band states on the landing page that it was updated on the 23rd of September 1995, but the page itself refers to a new 2m band plan that was approved in October of 2020. The linked band plan contains all the credit, who is responsible for the plan, naming the entire committee, adding notes and requesting donations, straight from the RAC newsletter, page 36 and 37 of the November / December 2020 edition, rather than providing a stand-alone technical document. Let's hop back across the Atlantic and see what else we can learn. In Switzerland things are a little different. Its regulator publishes a frequency allocation plan that is a thing of beauty. It presents as a table on a web page, but it has a search box you can use to filter the frequencies that you're interested in. So if you use the word "amateur", you end up seeing the whole amateur radio spectrum as it exists within the borders of Switzerland. You can also set frequency ranges and as a bonus, if you type in 1 MHz and change the unit to kHz, it actually changes the number to 1000. As I said, a thing of beauty. Oh, and the footnotes? Yeah, they're links and they open a new window with the relevant information, and you can keep clicking deeper and deeper until you get to the actual legislation driving that particular entry. If that's not fancy enough for you, from within the search, you can download an offline HTML copy, you can pick services, rather than use search terms, and the PDF version, because of course there is one, actually has the same active links to footnotes. That said, it has some idiosyncrasies. It specifies when amateur radio is the primary or the secondary user of a band, except when it doesn't. I presume that this is a regulatory thing and that it's a shared resource, but as an outsider I'm not familiar with Swiss law, but if I was inclined, I could become familiar, since the documents are all written in multiple languages, including English. Another oddity is that some frequencies show no text at all, but I presume that's a bug, rather than by design. Speaking of bugs, or features, depending on your perspective. Consider the frequency 2300 MHz. Every single document I looked at mixes up how this is shown. Some have a space between the number and the unit, some don't. Some countries put a space between the 2 and the 3, some a dot, some a comma, the Swiss use an apostrophe. Just so we're clear, these are technical documents we're talking about. They're not literary works, there are standards for how to do this, but it seems that the people writing these documents are blissfully unaware of any such references. Even the IARU cannot agree on how to represent the same number, let alone use the same formatting for the same band plan in each of its three regions. At this point you might come to the conclusion that this is all an abhorrent mess and I'd agree with you. In my opinion, it goes directly to how important our hobby is in the scheme of things and just how little funding is allocated to our activities. It also shows that there are contradictory sources of truth and not a single unified view on how to present this information to the global amateur community. In case you're wondering why that matters, electromagnetism doesn't stop at the political boundaries of the location where we might find ourselves and if that doesn't matter to you, consider again how you'd best talk to an amateur of any given DXCC entity and on what particular frequency you might achieve that. So, aside from whinging about it, what can you do about this? I have started a project, of course I have, that attempts to document two things, well, three. First of all I use the WIA version of the DXCC list - since the ARRL doesn't actually publish that for free anywhere - and use that to track a list of hopefully official frequency allocation documents. I'm also in the process of capturing the content of each of those documents into a database, so we can all figure out what the best frequency is to talk to another country. I'm still in the design stages for the database, for example, do we want to store a frequency in Hertz, in kHz, or pick a magnitude and store a number? Each of these choices has long term implications for using the tool. Then there's things like discovering which band plan applies to Scarborough Reef, the San Felix Islands and Pratas Island to name a few, since I've really only scratched the surface with the plans I've explored. I had visions of putting this on GitHub, but perhaps this should be part of the Wikipedia collection and it should live there. I'm still considering the best plan of attack. In the meantime, you can help. Please send an email to cq@vk6flab.com with the official band plan link for your own DXCC entity, and if you have thoughts on how best to structure the database or where this project should live, let me know. For example, should the database include just band plans, or should we also include things like modes. For example, the official VK calling frequency for 40m is 7.093 MHz. Should that be in the database and should we include the preferred Olivia calling frequency? While looking at that, consider the band labels we use. Australia doesn't have a 75m band, but others do. Some countries refer to the 4mm band, others refer to it by frequency. So, over to you. Let me know what you think. I'll leave you with a quote by Daren 2E0LXY: "It is not the class of licence the Amateur holds but the class of the Amateur that holds the licence." I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is a perception in the community that the hobby of amateur radio is an expensive way to have fun. While it's entirely possible to spend thousands of dollars on equipment, in much the same way that it's possible if your preferred hobby is golf, getting started does not have to require that you start planting money trees. Lots of fun can be had using cheap amateur radio transceivers that are used all around the world. If you do start with such a radio, the chances are good that you'll come across amateurs who make disparaging remarks about the lack of compliance of such radios. When I say compliance, I'm talking about specific measurements specified by the International Telecommunications Union, the ITU. When you transmit on a specific frequency, there are rules about how much that signal is allowed to be unintended, or to use the official term, spurious emissions. Specifically, the signal you transmit has to meet the requirements for the mode you're using and it must also stay within limits on other frequencies. For example, if you have a 2m handheld radio that uses FM, the transmitter must stay within the required width for FM and it's not allowed to transmit above a certain level on any of the harmonic frequencies. When someone claims that all cheap radios are non-compliant, they're saying that such radios are either not transmitting a valid FM signal, or that the levels of the signal exceed the limits specified by the ITU. Given that such radios are in wide use, Randall VK6WR, Glynn VK6PAW and I got together to see if we could come up with something a little more scientific in the way of comment about such radios. With access to Randall's HP 8920A RF Communications Test Set we came up with a repeatable way to test a radio and then went to the local HAMfest where we subjected a pile of radios to our tests. In total we did 75 tests. Overall we tested 39 distinct models across 12 brands. So, what did we learn? All so-called "name brand" radios were fully compliant. All radios that were sold in Australia by Australian distributors were compliant. Baofeng radios made up the largest sample of inexpensive radios. Seven out of the 26 tested were compliant, eight were non-compliant and the rest, 11 were borderline. More on that shortly. We also tested many radios that had been purchased online. We didn't test enough of each model to make specific comments, but it's worth pointing out that half of all the online radios were compliant. Now, I mentioned borderline compliance. What we learnt was that there were some radios that fell within 6 dB of being compliant. The HP test set hasn't been calibrated for a while and we felt that allowing for a 3 dB random measurement error and a 3 dB systematic error would prevent us from marking a radio non-compliant when in fact it was. We categorised 16 radios as borderline. Our report is of course public. You can find it on my GitHub page as both a PDF and a markdown document. Whilst we were writing our report, we discovered uncorroborated suggestions that some radios might fail an emissions test after suffering unspecified damage in the output filtering stages. We looked at the schematic of one radio that suggests that a simple capacitor failure might cause a filter to fail without preventing the transmitter from operating. This might mean that a non-compliant transmitter might be made compliant again by replacing the faulty capacitor. We haven't tried and we don't know if a failed capacitor actually makes a radio non-compliant or not, or even if such a failure could occur and if-so, how. In other words, this might be a red-herring, we just don't know. One other comment worth pointing out is that it was suggested that some radios might use a specifically designed antenna to suppress the second harmonic. Given that some radios failed only on the second harmonic spurious emission requirement, but not the third, this seems plausible. All radios we tested had removable antennas and were tested without an antenna, since compliance relates to the transmitter, not the antenna. It does raise a more interesting question. What happens if you fit a different antenna to the radio? One adage that stands is that "you get what you pay for", but given the amount of cheap testing equipment available, it's relatively easy to test every handset in your shack. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

The world is currently witnessing the rapid commercialization of space. According to Google, there are over 100 launch companies, some of which are already in regular operation. But what happens when these rockets deliver their payloads to space? How do satellites, which are the payloads, move from their drop-off points to the specific orbits assigned by the International Telecommunications Union? I'm your host, Kevin Blevins, and today, I'm joined by Dan Olson, the Vice President of Engineering at Impulse Space, a startup dedicated to in-space transportation and infrastructure for the commercialization of space. In this episode, we will explore various aspects of Impulse Space's work and the aerospace industry. In this episode, you will gain insights into the exciting developments in the commercialization of space and Impulse Space's pivotal role in this rapidly evolving industry. Additionally, you'll discover more about Dan's remarkable journey, from designing race cars to spacecraft, highlighting the surprising commonalities in design and innovation across different sectors. What You'll Learn in This Episode: Dan's journey from designing race cars to spacecraft (02:12) Impulse Base and its innovative products (07:05) SpaceX launch and payload capabilities (12:15) Space transportation and missions with Impulse Space (17:08) impulse base and its Siemens software integration. (23:41) Connect with Dan Olson: LinkedIn Website Connect with Kevin Blevins: LinkedIn

Foundations of Amateur Radio At a recent local HAMfest we set-up a table to measure second and third harmonic emissions from any handheld radio that came our way. The process was fun and we learnt lots and in due course we plan to publish a report on our findings. When we received a handheld, we would disconnect the antenna, and replace it with a short length of coax and connect it to a spectrum analyser. We would then trigger the Push To Talk, or PTT button and measure several things. We'd record the actual frequency and how many Watts that the transmitter was producing and then record the power level in dBm for the base frequency, double that frequency and triple that frequency. In other words, we'd record the base, second and third harmonics. This resulted in a list of numbers. Frequency and power in Watts are obvious, but the three dBm numbers caused confusion for many visitors. The most perplexing appeared to be that we were producing negative dBm numbers, and truth be told, some positive ones as well, we'll get to those in our report. How can you have negative power you ask? As I've discussed before. A negative dBm number isn't a negative value of power, it's a fraction, so, -30 dBm represents 0.000001 Watts and you'd have to admit that -30 dBm rolls off the tongue just a little easier. What we measured and logged was the overall transmitter output and at specific frequencies. As I've discussed previously, if you transmit using any transceiver, you'll produce power at the intended frequency, but there will also be unintended or unwanted transmissions, known as spurious emissions. The International Telecommunications Union, or ITU, has standards for such emissions. In Australia the regulator, the ACMA, uses the ITU standard for radio amateurs, but I should point out that this might not be the case where you are. It's entirely possible, and given human diversity, probable even, that there are places where there are more stringent requirements, so bear that in mind. I'll state the standard and then explain. For frequencies greater than 30 MHz, the spurious emission must not exceed the lesser of 43 + 10 * log (power) or 70 dB. That might sound like gobbledegook, so let's explore. First thing to notice is that this is for transmissions where the transmitter is tuned to a frequency greater than 30 MHz, there's a separate rule for frequencies less than 30 MHz and the ITU also specifies a range of different limits for special purpose transmitters like broadcast radio and television, space services, and others. Second thing is that the spurious emissions are calculated based on total mean output power. This means that your spurious emissions are considered in relation to how much power you're using to transmit and it implies that for some transmitters you can be in compliance at one power level, but not at another, so keep that in mind. The phrase "the lesser of", means that from a compliance perspective, there's a point at which power levels no longer determine how much attenuation of spurious emissions is required. You can calculate that point. It's where our formula hits 70 dB, and that is at 500 Watts. In other words, to meet the ITU standard, if you're transmitting with less than 500 Watts, you're subject to the formula and if you're transmitting with more than 500 Watts, you're required to meet the 70 dB standard. It means that, at least in Australia, spurious emissions for amateurs are dependent on transmitter power because the maximum permitted power is currently 400 Watts for an amateur holding a so-called Advanced License. Now I'll also point out explicitly that the emission standards that the ITU specifies are for generic "radio equipment", which includes amateur radio, but also includes anything else with a transmitter. One thing to mention is that spurious emissions aren't limited to the second and third harmonics that we measured, in fact they're not even limited to harmonics. If you're using a particular mode then anything that's transmitted outside the bandwidth of that mode is considered a spurious emission and there are standards for that as well. As an aside, it was interesting to me that in many cases amateur radio is treated separately from other radio services, but the ITU considers our community just one of several spectrum users and it's good to remember that the entire universe is playing in the same sandbox, even if only some of it is regulated by the ITU and your local regulator. So, let's imagine that you have a handheld radio that has a total mean power output of 5 Watts. When you calculate using the formula, you end up at 50 dB attenuation. In other words, the spurious emissions may not exceed -13 dBm. So, if your radio measures -20 dBm on the second harmonic, it's compliant for that harmonic, but if it measures -10 dBm, it's not. I should also point out that this is for each spurious emission. About half the radios we tested had a second harmonic that was worse than the third harmonic. So, what does this mean for your radio? I'd recommend that you start reading and measuring. You'll need to measure the total mean power, and the signal strength at the base frequency and the second and third harmonic. I will mention that surprises might happen. For example, the Yaesu FT-857d radio I use every week to host a net appears to be transmitting with a power level that doesn't match its setting. At 5 Watts, it's only transmitting just over 2 Watts into the antenna, but at the 10 Watt setting, it's pretty much 10 Watts. You also don't need a fancy tool like we were using. All these measurements are relative to each other and you could even use a $20 RTL-SDR USB dongle, but before you start transmitting into its antenna port, make sure you have enough attenuation connected between the transmitter and your dongle, otherwise you'll quickly discover the escape velocity of the magic smoke inside. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There's nothing quite as satisfying as the click of a well designed piece of equipment. It's something that tickles the brain and done well it makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. If time was on my side and I wasn't going somewhere else with this, I'd now regale you with research on the phenomenon, I'd explore the community of people building mechanical keyboards and those who restore equipment to their former glory, instead I'm encouraging you to dig whilst I talk about the second and third harmonics. This is about amateur radio after all. Over the years there has been a steady stream of commentary around the quality of handheld radios. Some suggest that the cheaper the radio, the worse it is. Given that these kinds of radios are often the very first purchase for an aspiring amateur it would be useful to have a go at exploring this. When a radio is designed the aim is for it to transmit exactly where it's intended to and only there. Any transmission that's not where you plan is considered a spurious emission. By carefully designing a circuit, by adding shielding, by filtering and other techniques these spurious emissions can be reduced or eliminated, but this costs money, either in the design stage, or in the cost of materials and manufacturing. It's logical to think that the cheaper the radio, the worse it is, but is it really true that a cheap radio has more spurious emissions than an expensive one? To give you an example of a spurious emission, consider an FM transmitter tuned to the 2m amateur band, let's say 146.5 MHz. If you key the radio and all is well, the radio will only transmit at that frequency, but that's not always the case. It turns out that if you were to listen on 293 MHz, you might discover that your radio is also transmitting there. If you're familiar with the amateur radio band plan, you'll know that 293 MHz is not allocated as an amateur frequency, so we're not allowed to transmit there, in fact, in Australia that frequency is reserved for the Australian Department of Defence, and there's an additional exclusion for the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. 293 MHz isn't a random frequency. It's twice 146.5 MHz and it's called the second harmonic. There's more. If you multiply the base frequency by three, you end up at 439.5 MHz, the third harmonic. In Australia, that frequency falls into the amateur allocation as a second use, its primary use is again the Department of Defence. These two transmissions are examples of spurious emissions. To be clear, the transmitter is tuned to 146.5 MHz and these unintended extra signals come out of the radio at the same time. This is bad for several reasons, legal and otherwise. The first, obvious one, is that you're transmitting out of band, which as an amateur you already have no excuse for, since getting your license requires you to understand that this is strictly not allowed. The International Telecommunications Union, or ITU, has specific requirements for what's permitted in the way of spurious emissions from an amateur station. Spurious emissions also mean that there is energy being wasted. Instead of the signal only coming out at the intended frequency, some of it is appearing elsewhere, making the 5 Watts you paid for less effective than you hoped for. So, what's this got to do with the click I started with? Well, thanks to Randall, VK6WR, I have on loan a heavy box with a Cathode Ray Tube or Green CRT screen, lots of buttons and knobs and the ability to measure such spurious emissions. It's marked "HP 8920A RF Communications Test Set". Using this equipment is very satisfying. You switch it on and a fan starts whirring. After a moment you hear a beep, then the screen announces itself, almost as-if there's a PC in there somewhere - turns out that there is and the beep is the Power On Self Test, or POST beep. Originally released in 1992, this magic box can replace 22 instruments for transceiver testing. I started downloading user manuals, oh boy, there's lots to learn. Bringing back lots of memories, it even has a programming language, Instrument BASIC, to control it. Where have you been all my life? Turns out that in 1992 this piece of kit cost as much as my car. Anything for the hobby right? At the next HAMfest I'll be using it to measure as many handhelds as I can get my hands on and taking notes. I have no idea how many I'll be able to test, but I'm looking forward to putting some numbers against the repeated claims of quality and price. I can tell you that a couple of weeks ago I got together with Randall and Glynn VK6PAW and spent an enjoyable afternoon testing several radios and there are some surprising results already. Perhaps this is something you might attempt at your next community event, gather data, rather than opinions... I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Thanks to several high profile races we already know that sending Morse is faster than SMS. Recently I started digging into the underpinnings of Morse code to answer the question, "Can you send Morse faster than binary encoded ASCII?" Both ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange and Morse are techniques to encode information for electronic transmission. One is built for humans, the other for computers. To answer the question, which is faster, I set out to investigate. I'm using the 2009 ITU or International Telecommunications Union standard Morse for this. Morse is said to be optimised for sending messages in English. In Morse the letter "e", represented by "dit" is the quickest to send, the next is the letter "t", "dah", followed by "i", dit-dit, "a", dit-dah, "n", dah-dit, and "m", dah-dah. The underlying idea is that communication speed is increased by making the most common letter the fastest to send and so-on. Using a computer this is simple to test. I counted the letters of almost 400,000 words of my podcast and discovered that "e" is indeed the most common letter, the letter "t" is next, then "a", "o", and "i". Note that I said "letter". The most common character in my podcast is the "space", which in Morse takes seven dits to send. Also note that the Morse top-5 is "etian", the letter "o" is 14th on the list in terms of speed. In my podcast it's the fourth most popular letter, mind you, my name is "Onno", so you might think that is skewing the data. Not so much. If I use the combined works of Shakespeare, and given that it represents an older and less technical use of language, and doesn't feature my name, I figured it might have a different result. The top-5 in his words are "etoai", the letter "o" is the third most popular, and "space" still leads the charge, by nearly 3 times. I also had access to a listing of 850 job advertisements, yes, still looking, and the character distribution top-5 is "eotin", the letter "o" is the second most popular letter. Because I can, and I'm well, me, I converted the ITU Morse Code standard to text and counted the characters there too. The top-5 letters are "etion", but the full stop is a third more popular than the letter "e", mind you that might be because the people at the ITU still need to learn how to use a computer, seriously, storing documents inside the "Program Files" directory under the ITU_Admin user, what were you thinking? I digress. The "space" is still on top, nearly six times as common as the letter "e". As an aside, it's interesting to note that you cannot actually transmit the ITU Morse standard using standard Morse, since the document contains square brackets, a multiplication symbol, asterisks, a copyright symbol, percent signs, em-dashes, and both opening and closing quotation marks, none of which exist as valid symbols. Back to Morse. The definition has other peculiarities. For example the open parenthesis takes less time to send than the closing one, but you would think that they are equally common, given that they come in pairs. If you look at numbers, "5" takes the least amount to send, "0" the longest. In my podcast text "0" is a third more common than "1" and "9" is the least common. In Shakespeare, "9" is the most common, "8" the least, and in job listings, "0" and "2" go head-to-head, and both are four times as common as the number "7" which is the least common. All this to say that character distribution is clearly not consistent across different texts and Morse is built around more than the popularity of letters of the alphabet. For example, the difference between the left and right parenthesis is a dah at the end. If you know one of the characters, you know the other. The numerical digits follow a logical progression from all dits to all dahs between "0" and "9". In other words, the code appears to be designed with humans in mind. There are other idiosyncrasies. Most of the code builds in sequences, but there are gaps. If you visualise Morse as a tree, the letter "e" has two children, both starting with a dit, one followed by another dit, or dit-dit, the letter "i", and the other, followed by a dah, dit-dah, the letter "a". Similarly, the letter "t", a dah, has two children dah-dit, "n" and dah-dah, "m". This sequence can be built for many definitions, but not all. The letter "o", dah-dah-dah, has no direct children. There's no dah-dah-dah-dit or dah-dah-dah-dah sequence in Morse. The letter "u", dit-dit-dah has one child "f", dit-dit-dah-dit, but the combination dit-dit-dah-dah is not valid Morse. It's those missing combinations that led me to believe that Morse isn't as efficient as it could be and what originally led me to investigate the underpinnings of this language. I think it's fair to conclude at this point that Morse isn't strictly optimised for English, or if it is, a very small subset of the language. It has several eccentricities, not unlike the most popular computer keyboard layout, QWERTY, which wasn't laid out for humans or speed typing, rather the opposite, it was to slow a typist down to prevent keys from getting in each other's way when there was still a mechanical arm punching a letter into a page. In other words, Morse code has a history. Now I'm off to start throwing some CPU cycles at the real question. Is Morse code faster than binary encoded ASCII? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you've ever looked at Morse Code, you might be forgiven if you conclude that it appears to be a less than ideal way of getting information from point A to point B. The idea is simple, based on a set of rules, you translate characters, one at a time, into a series of dits and dahs, each spaced apart according to the separation between each element, each character and each word. The other day I came across a statement that asserted that you could send Morse faster than binary encoded ASCII letters. If you're not sure what that means, there are many different ways to encode information. In Morse, the letter "e" is the first character, represented by "dit", the letter "t" is the second character, represented by "dah". In ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, the letter "e" is the 69th character, represented by 100 0101. The letter "t" is number 84 on the list, represented by 101 0100. A couple of things to observe. The order of the characters between Morse and ASCII are not the same. That doesn't really matter, as long as both the sender and receiver agree that they're using the same list. Another thing to notice is that in Morse, letters are encoded using dits and dahs and appropriate spacing. In ASCII, or technically, binary coded ASCII, the letters are encoded using zero and one. I'll also mention that there are plenty of other ways to encode information, EBCDIC or Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code was defined by IBM for its mainframe and mid-range computers. It's still in use today. In EBCDIC, the letter "e" is 133 and the letter "t" is 163. It was based around punched cards to ensure that hole punches were not too close together. It was designed for global use and can, for example, support Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Greek. Another encoding you might have heard of is UTF-16, which supports over a million different characters including all the emojis in use today. Before I continue, I must make a detour past the ITU or the International Telecommunications Union. The ITU has a standard, called "Recommendation M.1677-1", approved on the 3rd of October 2009, which defines International Morse code. I'm making that point because I'm going to dig deeper into Morse and it helps if we're talking about the same version of Morse. I have talked about many versions of Morse before, so I'll leave that alone, but I will point out a couple of things. The ITU defines 56 unique Morse sequences or characters. The obvious ones are the letters of the alphabet, the digits and several other characters like parentheses, quotes, question mark, full-stop, and comma, including the symbol in the middle of an email address, which it calls the "commercial at symbol" with a footnote telling us that the French General Committee on Terminology approved the term "arobase" in December 2002, but it seems that seven years isn't enough time to convince the ITU to update its own standard, mind you, the rest of the world, well, the English speaking part, calls it "at", the letter "a" with a circle around it, as in my email address, cq@vk6flab.com. Another thing to note is that this standard is only available in English, Arabic, Chinese, French and Russian, so I'm not sure what the Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali and Japanese communities, who represent a similar population size do for their Morse definitions. It's interesting to note that as part of its commitment to multilingualism, the ITU actually defines six official languages. Specifically, the "Spanish" version of the standard appears to be missing. There's other curious things. For example, the standard defines a special character called "accented e", though it doesn't describe which accent, given that there are four variants in French alone, I found at least seven versions and it completely ignores accents on the i, the c, the o, special character combinations like "sz" in German and "ij" in Dutch. This isn't to throw shade on Morse, it's to point out that it's an approximation of a language with odd variations. I'm also going to ignore capitalisation. In Morse there's none and in ASCII, there are definitions for both, capitalised and not. In addition to things you write in a message, there's also control codes. The ITU defines six specific Morse control codes. Things like "Understood", "Wait", and "Error". ASCII has those too. The first 31 codes in ASCII are reserved for controls like "linefeed", "carriage return", and "escape". There are other oddities. The ITU specifies that the control code "Invitation to transmit" is symbolised by dah-dit-dah. If you're familiar with Morse, you'll know that this is the same as the letter "k". The specification says that multiplication is dah-dit-dit-dah, which is the same as "x". There's also rules on how to signify percentages and fractions using dah-dit-dit-dit-dit-dah, the hyphen, as a separator. At this point I haven't even gotten close to exploring efficiency, but my curiosity is in overdrive. Is Morse really optimised for English, or are there other forces at work? I'm already digging. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever made an international contact using amateur radio and used that towards tracking an award like for example the DXCC? If you're not familiar, it's an award for amateurs who make contact with at least 100 "distinct geographic and political entities". In 1935 the American Radio Relay League, or ARRL published an article by Clinton B. DeSoto, W1CBD, titled: "How to Count Countries Worked: A New DX Scoring System". In the article he asks: "Are Tasmania and Australia separate countries?" In case you're wondering, Tasmania has, at least in legal terms, been part of Australia since Federation in 1901. Not to be confused with New Zealand, a separate country over 4,000 kilometres to the east of Australia, Tasmania is the island at the south eastern tip of Australia. It was previously called the Colony of Tasmania, between 1856 and 1901 and before that it was called Van Diemen's Land between 1642 and 1856. Before then it was inhabited by the palawa people who lived there for about 42,000 years. They eventually became isolated after being cut off from the mainland by the Bass Strait when about 10,000 years ago sea levels rose due to the ice age coming to an end. In the last remaining local Aboriginal language 'palawa kani' it appears to have been called 'lutruwita' (/lu-tru-wee-ta/), but no living speakers of any of the original Tasmanian languages exist. As audio evidence, we have a few barely audible sounds spoken by Fanny Cochrane Smith on a wax record from 1899 on which she sang traditional songs. I'm mentioning this to illustrate that DeSoto asking the question: "Are Tasmania and Australia separate countries?" is, in my opinion, fundamentally misguided. More so because of an island, well, rock, Boundary Islet, that's split by a border, one half belonging to Victoria, the other half to Tasmania. Specifically, since 1825, the state of Victoria and the state of Tasmania share a land border thanks to a survey error made in 1801. If you're into Islands on the Air, or IOTA, it's part of the Hogan Island Group which for activation purposes is part of the Furneaux Group, which has IOTA designation OC-195. One point to make is that today the DXCC does not mention Tasmania, either as a separate entity, or as a deleted entity. It was removed from the DXCC in 1947. The DXCC list is pretty famous in amateur radio circles. It's not the only such list. I already mentioned the IOTA list which contains a list of islands and island groups and their IOTA designation. There's also a list of 40 groups of callsign prefixes called CQ zones, published in CQ magazine, and a list of IARU regions maintained by the International Amateur Radio Union. There's also an ITU zone list, maintained by the International Telecommunications Union. Each of these lists are essentially grouped collections with an attached label. The list of DXCC entities is copyrighted by the ARRL. If you want to use it for anything other than personal use you need to ask permission. In other words, if you write software that for example tracks amateur radio contacts and you make that software available for others to use, you officially need permission from the ARRL to use it to track a DXCC. If you're an amateur outside of the United States your peak body will need permission from the ARRL to issue any DXCC award. The ITU, the International Telecommunications Union is a United Nations specialised agency, part of our global community, owned by all humans. It peppers its content with copyright notices. The same is true for the International Amateur Radio Union, the IARU, the global representative body of all radio amateurs. It too peppers its content with copyright notices, even going so far as to add requirements that "(a)ny copy or portion must include a copyright notice" and that "(i)t is used for informational, non-commercial purposes only". Let me ask you a question. Can you achieve a DXCC without international cooperation? Of course not. If you are an American amateur and want to get an award for contacting 100 distinct geographic and political entities, you can only do so by making contacts outside the United States of America. As an Australian however, I have, according to the February 2022 version of the DXCC list, 340 countries to choose from, only one of which is the United States of America, and Alaska isn't part of the United States, apparently. It might appear that I'm singling out the ARRL, but that's not true. CQ Communications, Inc. owns the list of CQ Zones, the ITU owns the list of ITU zones, the IARU owns the list of IARU Regions, Islands On The Air Ltd. and the Radio Society of Great Britain own the IOTA list and Clinton B. DeSoto W1CBD became a silent key in 1949, his copyright expired in 1999. So, is grouping and labelling things sufficient to actually claim copyright? Can I claim copyright for all countries starting with the letter 'A' and calling it the 'Alpha Amateur Award'? My preliminary list for the 'Alpha Amateur Award' includes Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Antigua, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria and Azerbaijan and because it's not part of the United States, Alaska. Which reminds me, to encourage amateur radio activity in continents that need more, I'll add Africa and Antarctica. Consider that the 2023 edition of the triple A. A bigger question to ask is: "Why should I need permission to use any of these lists?" Can I create a public repository on GitHub that has all these lists in a single place, so others could use them without needing to hunt? What if I wanted to reformat and reuse these lists to create an online service to show the relationship between each of these lists for use by all radio amateurs? What if I wanted to charge a subscription fee to pay for the service? What if I wanted to roll out a whole company behind it and pay people to maintain it? I'm all for people creating things and receiving credit, but at some point we start to take away from the community instead of giving back to it. Are these lists really owned by the various organisations claiming copyright and requiring written permission for their use, or do they belong to all radio amateurs? Oh, the 'Alpha Amateur Award' list is copyleft. Look it up. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

On this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Frederic Werner and Neil Sahota from AI for Good join Ryan Chacon to discuss the global impact of AI. They talk about the AI hype cycle, the state of AI, defining good AI use cases, balancing different perspectives on AI, scaling AI for global impact, current AI trends and use cases, AI and IoT, challenges in AI, AI developments and the future of AI, fear of AI, and the 2023 AI for Good Global Summit. Frederic Werner is a seasoned Association Management professional with a passion for telecommunications specializing in strategic communications, community building, and international relations. He is the Head of Strategic Engagement for ITU's standardization bureau and was instrumental in the creation of the landmark AI for Good Global Summit. Frederic is deeply involved with innovation, digital transformation, financial inclusion, 5G, and AI via numerous ICT industry projects and events he has developed. Neil Sahota is an IBM Master Inventor, United Nations Artificial Intelligence Advisor, author of the best-seller "Own the AI Revolution" and sought-after speaker. With 20+ years of business experience, Neil works to inspire clients and business partners to foster innovation and develop next generation products/solutions powered by AI. AI for Good is an organization that identifies practical applications of AI to advance the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and scale AI solutions for global impact. It's the leading action-oriented, global, and inclusive United Nations platform on AI. AI for Good is organized by ITU in partnership with 40 UN Sister Agencies and co-convened with Switzerland.  Interested in AI? We're launching AI For All!Subscribe to the AI For All newsletter: https://ai-forall.comFollow AI For All on social: https://linktr.ee/aiforallofficial Discover more about AI and IoT at https://www.iotforall.comMore about AI for Good: https://aiforgood.itu.intConnect with Frederic: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fredericwerner/Connect with Neil: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilsahota/ Key Questions and Topics from this Episode: (00:00) Welcome to the IoT For All Podcast (01:12) Introduction to Frederic Werner, Neil Sahota, and AI for Good (04:47) AI hype cycle and state of AI (07:46) What are good AI use cases? (10:20) Balancing different perspectives on AI (12:25) Scaling AI for global impact (16:02) Current AI trends and use cases (17:36) AI and IoT (19:39) Challenges in AI (24:58) AI developments and future of AI (28:45) Fear of AI (32:29) AI for Good Global Summit 2023  SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHANNEL: https://bit.ly/2NlcEwm​ Join Our Newsletter: https://www.iotforall.com/iot-newsletterFollow Us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/iotforallCheck out the IoT For All Media Network: https://www.iotforall.com/podcast-overview

According to The International Telecommunications Union, two-thirds of the world now has internet access. On this month's episode of the Mosaic Moment, PPI's Ed Gresser sits down with two of the nation's leading broadband experts, Meagan Bolton and Christine O'Connor to discuss where connectivity gaps remain and what U.S. policymakers are doing to bridge this digital divide. From infrastructure challenges to new digital trade policies, hear what these experts have to say about the future of internet access, adoption, and affordability. Follow Ed Gresser on Twitter: @EBGresser Follow Christine O'Connor on Twitter: @CNOConnor Follow Meagan Bolton on Twitter: @MeaganSunn Follow Mosaic on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MosaicPPI  Follow PPI on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ppi

Foundations of Amateur Radio Our community is full of TLAs, or three letter acronyms. Some of them more useful than others. For example, I can tell you thank you for the QSO, I'm going QRT, QSY to my QTH. Or, thanks for the chat, I'll just shut up and take my bat and ball and go home. Acronyms arise every day and it came as no surprise to spot a new one in the wild the other day, SHF. It was in a serious forum, discussing antennas if I recall, so I didn't blink and looked it up. Super High Frequency. Okay, so, where's that? I'm familiar with VHF and UHF and as radio amateurs we're often found somewhere on HF, that's Very High Frequency, Ultra High Frequency and High Frequency if you're curious. Turns out that the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union has an official list, of course it does. The current ITU "Radio Regulations" is the 2020 edition. It's great bedtime reading. Volume one of four, Chapter one of ten, Article two of three, Section one of three, Provision 2.1 starts off with these words: "The radio spectrum shall be subdivided into nine frequency bands, which shall be designated by progressive whole numbers in accordance with the following table." When you look at this table you'll discover it starts with band number four and ends with band number twelve, between them covering 3 kHz to 3000 GHz. In position ten you'll see the designation "SHF", covering 3 to 30 GHz, centrimetric waves. A couple of things to note. The list starts at band four. There are of course frequencies below 3 kHz. The list ends at twelve, but there are frequencies above 3000 GHz. You'll also note that I'm not saying 3 Terahertz, since the ITU regulations specify that you shall express frequencies up to 3000 GHz using "gigahertz". Interestingly the same document has a provision for reporting interference where you can report using Terahertz frequencies, so I'm not sure how the ITU deals with such reports. Another thing to note is that this table doesn't actually define what SHF means. It's nowhere in the radio regulations either, I looked. I'm not sure where the words Super High Frequency came from. There is an ITU online database for looking up acronyms and terms. That leads to a document called "Nomenclature of the frequency and wavelength bands used in telecommunications", which also doesn't use "Super High Frequency" anywhere. That said, using the ITU band four, where its definition starts, the VLF band, or Very Low Frequency, followed by LF, Low Frequency, MF, Medium Frequency, the familiar HF or High Frequency, VHF, UHF, then SHF and beyond that, EHF, Extremely High Frequency and THF or Tremendously High Frequency, yes, Tremendously High. There's a report called the "Technical and operational characteristics and applications of the point-to-point fixed service applications operating in the frequency band 275-450 GHz". It introduces the term "THF which stands for tremendously high frequency" but adds the disclaimer that "this terminology is used only within this Report." Seems that there are plenty of documents on the ITU website using that same definition, so I'm guessing that the cat is out of the bag. THF by the way is defined as being for 300 to 3000 GHz frequencies. By the way, the ITU TLA finder exposes that THF stands for Topology Hiding Function. Where's a good acronym when you need it? Speaking of definitions, I came across the definition of a "taboo channel" which according to the ITU is "A channel which coincides with the frequency of the local oscillator in the single super heterodyne receiver which is tuned to an analogue channel." Anyway, we still have a way to go. Below band four, less than 3 kHz, we have ULF or Ultra Low Frequency, SLF, Super Low Frequency and ELF, Extremely Low Frequency, which is defined as band one, between 3 and 30 Hz. Below that, some have suggested TLF, or Tremendously Low Frequency which apparently goes between 1 and 3 Hz with a wavelength between 300,000 down to 100,000 km. Others have suggested that this is an internet meme, but so far it seems to me that it has just as much legitimacy as any of the other wordings, since it appears that the ITU explicitly excludes such definitions, even if internal documents introduce terms from time to time. It did make me wonder, what comes after Tremendously High Frequencies, Red? Turns out, yes, well, infra-red pretty much follows on from Tremendously High Frequencies. If you think that's the end of it, think again. The IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has its own definitions, of course it does. Unfortunately they decided that you need to pay for their standard. It was first issued in 1976 "to remove the confusion". There's an xkcd comic called "Standards", number 927 if you're looking. It goes like this: Situation: There are 14 competing standards. 14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases. Yeah! Soon: Situation: There are 15 competing standards. Anyway, the IEEE designates that after UHF comes L or Long wave, followed by S, or Short wave, then comes C, the compromise between Short wave and X or cross or Exotic. Then there's Ku, Kurtz Under, K, Kurtz, and Ka or Kurtz above, Kurtz being the German word for Short. There's the V band and the W band which follows the V band. Had enough yet? NATO, the EU and the US define these using letters of the alphabet. And broadcasters use Band Numbers which link up to nothing in particular. I wonder if the measure of a society is just how many different ways can be used to describe the same thing. Perhaps we should have stopped at Hertz or Hz, which was established in 1930 by the International Electrotechnical Commission, as an expression of the number of times that a repeated event occurs per second, in honour of Heinrich Hertz. One more three letter acronym, the International Electrotechnical Commission is better known as the IEC. I wonder if the ITU is taking suggestions, ginormous, utterly, inordinately, awfully and humongously seem like perfect opportunities for future expansion. I'm Onno VK6FLAB.

Jeff Smulyan is known for creating the format of sports radio. Smulyan is the Founder, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of Emmis Broadcasting. In 1987, he created WFAN Radio in New York, the 1st 24-hour sports radio station of its kind. That spawned hundreds of sports radio stations across the country. In 1989, Smulyan lead a group that purchased the Seattle Mariners. In 1994, he was named to the White House as a US Ambassador to head the US Delegation to the Plenipotentiary Conference of the International Telecommunications Union. Living in Indianapolis, Smulyan penned his memoir which was recently this year. It is entitled, “ Never Ride a Roller Coaster Upside Down – The Ups, Downs, and Reinvention of an Entrepreneur.” It can be found here: https://a.co/g9fjkDu. In this episode, Smulyan talks extensively about what went right and what didn't during his tenure as the Mariners' owner. He also talked about the idea to create a 24-hour sports station, and what made WFAN flourish. He also talked about the changing media landscape in both television and radio.

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the oldest means of electronic messaging is Morse code. Developed by Alfred Vail and Samuel Morse and sent for the first time on the 24th of May 1844, Morse code changed the way we communicate. For nearly a century it was required to become a licensed radio amateur until in 2003, the International Telecommunications Union or ITU left it to the discretion of individual countries to decide if a budding amateur needed to demonstrate their ability to send and receive in Morse. With that decision many thought that the end of Morse code was only a matter of time. They were wrong. Turns out that use and progress of Morse code continues at a surprising rate. Searching for scholarly articles on the subject, you'll discover that it's used, for communication by quadriplegics, for information exchange between IoT or Internet of Things devices, as a way to secure information combining DNA and Morse code, as a method for gesture recognition, as a research tool for psychologists interested in learning methodologies, for training neural nets, for REM sleep research and plenty more. Learning the code is an activity that sparks joy or dread, depending on whom you ask. For me it's been a decade of anticipation with little to show for it. How to learn is a question that prompts as many answers as there are people within earshot and most of those disagree with each other. If you do ask, you'll discover that there are dozens of websites that offer to teach you, podcasts and audio files, bits of paper, buzzers, software and video, images and cheat sheets, the list is endless. You'll also discover two terms, Koch and Farnsworth. Both are intended means of learning. You'll find proponents of both methods wherever you look. You'll also hear from people who learnt the Army way, whatever that means, there's people who were taught not to send before they could properly receive, those who were taught the opposite and everything in between. There's discussion on the topic, heated even, but very little in the way of actual hard data. There's some research. In 1990 the Keller Method from World War 2 was explored. The method involves playing a Morse letter, followed by a gap where the student is expected to write the letter, followed by a voice prompt of the letter. Interesting, were it not for the fact that it looked at nine students and only at their ability to master the alphabet. In 1960, 310 airmen were subjected to 14 tests to determine their ability to learn Morse. No idea what the research outcomes were, since the Journal of Applied Psychology doesn't appear to share their research unless you pay for it. There are reports of actual science behind the Koch method of learning, but I wasn't able to find it, though it's repeated often. It's only with the introduction of computers that actually using this method of learning has become practicable and recently popular. As you might know, I've been attempting to learn Morse code for a while now. I've tried many different things, including Farnsworth, Koch and others. I publish versions of my podcast as Morse code audio only. They're published every week and there are a few people who listen. I also attempted to make stereo audio files with a computer generated voice in one ear and a Morse word in the other, I generated flash cards, I tried learning the code as dits and dahs, but in the end, nothing really worked for me. About a month ago I came across a video on YouTube by Electronic Notes. It contained the Morse alphabet as audio and flashed the letter visually on the screen whilst the audio was playing. There's also a video with numbers and a combination of the two. It gave me the idea for something entirely different to try and in preparing to talk about this, it turns out that there's even research to suggest that I might be on to something. I discovered that in 1994, sixty healthy people were tested to determine if learning Morse code in a rehabilitation setting was best achieved using visual, auditory or a combination of both. The research conclusion was that the combination works best. My idea is a video that shows an individual word whilst Morse code for that word is heard. There's no dits and dahs on the screen, just the word, written in English, and the Morse code for the word. The speed is 25 Words Per Minute, or WPM, and it's played with a side-tone of 600 Hz. Each video is an entire podcast, lasts about 30 minutes, and plays at full speed. I'm already beginning to notice that some words sound like a sound blob in much the same way as when I learnt a new language, so I'm hopeful that this will finally get me on my way. It's early days and the video channel is an experiment, so please comment to share your thoughts on the experience. Who knows, I might have introduced a new way to learn. Now all we need is some research to compare it to other methods, Koch, Keller, Farnsworth and Onno, hi hi. You'll be able to find this article on YouTube too, "Morse is dead ... long live Morse!" I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Open-internet advocates are breathing a sigh of relief after a recent election for the International Telecommunications Union's top leadership.

Open-internet advocates are breathing a sigh of relief after a recent election for the International Telecommunications Union's top leadership.

UN countries are preparing to pick a new head of the International Telecommunications Union. Who wins could shape the open web's future.

UN countries are preparing to pick a new head of the International Telecommunications Union. Who wins could shape the open web's future.

In this episode, host Imogen Foulkes explores the most important UN agency most of us have never heard of.  Malcolm Johnson, deputy secretary general, ITU: ‘Telephony, radio and tv broadcasting , satellite communications, the internet, they wouldn't have developed.'  So what has the International Telecommunications Union ever done for us?  Fiona Alexander, IT expert: ‘If you're a beneficiary of any modern day communications network, you have benefitted from something that the ITU has done.'  And why are Russia and the United States competing to lead it?  Simon Manley, UK ambassador to the UN in Geneva: ‘We want to see an internet that is open, that is peaceful, that is secure, that enables the sharing of knowledge, the sharing of ideas.'  Can different countries really unite around best standards for the internet? And can they work together to bridge the digital divide?  Fiona Alexander, IT expert: ‘Every member state has a different perspective on what's appropriate and what's not appropriate online.'

Over the last decade, governments across the globe have launched digital transformation projects, from digitizing services to revamping their online presence for better citizen engagement. We discuss this with:  Katrine Maria Krzeminski, program manager, Agency for Digital Government, Copenhagen: Krzeminski discusses her project to create personal pages for each citizen on the country's public sector portal, how her team builds support from and collaborates with multiple government agencies on the multi-year effort, and how it's empowering citizens with data and increasing government transparency. Yolanda Martínez, global project lead for the GovStack initiative, International Telecommunications Union, Geneva: Martínez discusses how e-government services are changing how citizens interact with their governments, the challenges governments face when digitizing services as well as how the GovStack initiative is helping countries worldwide accelerate their digital transformation efforts, thanks, in part to an open-source platform. Key themes[01:58] Empowering Denmark's citizens with data [04:26] Collaborating with and building buy-in from government agencies [06:33] Tackling resourcing challenges, legacy systems when digitizing[11:05] How partners, potential users impact project decisions[14:18] Changing citizens' experience through e-government services[16:49] Breaking down silos and creating replicable assets to accelerate digitization[19:31] How GovStack aids countries in developing digital government services[23:52] Advice to project leaders: Co-design a vision with partners and set clear priorities

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of my favourite activities is contesting. Essentially it's a time-limited activation of your station for the purposes of testing your skill and station against other participants. Contests are controlled by rules as varied as the amateur community itself. That said, there are common terms and concepts and if you're not familiar with them, they can lead to confusion and disappointment when you inadvertently break a rule and see your hard work vanish into thin air. I will note that what I'm discussing here is not universally true, so read the rules for each contest you participate in, something you should already be doing since rules are refined over time and it's rare to keep the same rules between years. A contest starts and stops at a specific time, often expressed in UTC, or Universal Coordinated Time. You should know what your local timezone is in relation to UTC and take into account any variations like Summer and Winter time. Any contacts made outside these times don't count and you cannot log these against the contest. Each contact or QSO is awarded a set number of points. It might be scored based on mode, band, power, time and sometimes distance. To encourage specific types of contacts, some might attract a score of zero. This does not mean that the contact is useless, which I'll get to shortly. Your score is the sum of all the points you make for each contact. I will mention that contest logging software can track this to make your life easier, although it comes at the price of requiring a computer. Sometimes a prohibited contact attracts penalties. Prohibited, as-in, by the rules of that contest. For example, some allow you to contact the same station more than once, others allow this only if you do it on a different band. Speaking of bands. It's not permitted to make contest contacts on the WARC bands. In 1979, the World Administrative Radio Conference allocated the 30m, 17m and 12m bands for amateur use. These are not used for contesting. To avoid a contest, you can use those bands, but truth be told, you should try to use all the bands, even during contests, since it will help you operate your station in adverse conditions, something worth practising. Many contests allocate additional scoring based on state, country, DXCC entity, CQ or ITU zone, prefix, or all of these together. Both the CQ and ITU zones represent regions of the world. The CQ zones are managed by CQ Magazine and the ITU zones are managed by the International Telecommunications Union. A zone is represented by a number. The DXCC is a system that tracks individual countries across the globe. If you make contact with 100 of these places, you've achieved your DX Century and you join the DX Century Club, or DXCC. Consider a contact with me. You'd have a contact with VK6FLAB. It would also be a contact with the VK6 prefix, the VK DXCC entity, CQ zone 29 and ITU zone 58. If that's not enough, it would also be a contact with OC-001, the IOTA or Islands On The Air designation for Australia. This is useful because for some contests these extra features represent points, often significant ones, generally referred to as a "multiplier". To calculate your score, tally up all your contact points, then count all the features, CQ Zones, the ITU Zones, DXCC entities, states, countries, etc. and multiply your score with that count. If you contact 10 callsigns and get one point for each, you have 10 points. If in doing so you contact five contest features, you end up with an overall score of 50 points. Often contests have different categories and rules for transmitter power level, the number of transmitters and the number of operators. Definitions for these vary. High Power might be 400 Watts in Australia, but 1500 Watts in the United States. QRP or very low power might be 10 Watts in one contest, but 5 in another, so check. Some contests have an assisted category where you're permitted to use tools like the DX Cluster where other stations alert you online to their presence on a particular frequency. There is a concept of an overlay, where how long you've held your license, your age, working portable, battery operated, using a wire antenna or mobile, groups you with others doing the same thing. This means that you could be a rookie, youth, portable, battery, wire antenna, single assisted operator, all at the same time. It often pays to consider who else is in a particular group and make your claims accordingly. If you're contesting with more than one person, a Multi station, there are rules for that too. Sometimes this includes the amount of land a contest station is permitted to use. If you're a Multi-Single station, you might be permitted to use one transmitted signal on one band during any 10 minute period. A Multi-Two might be permitted to use two simultaneous transmitted signals, but they must be on two different bands. A Multi-Multi may activate all six contest bands at the same time, but only use one transmitter per band. Some contests have a Short Wave Listener or SWL category, where you log all stations heard. There is also the concept of a check-log, where you log all your contacts, submit them, but don't enter the contest itself. You might have worked stations during the contest, but not according to the rules, because you might be aiming to get your DXCC. Submitting your log will help the contest organisers check other entries and validate the scores of the stations you contacted. This might all be daunting, but if you read the rules of a contest and you're not sure, every contest manager I've ever spoken to is more than happy to help you understand what's allowed and what isn't. One tip. Contesting is as much about the rules that are written as it is about the rules that are not. If you find a gap in the rules, and it doesn't go against the spirit of the contest, you're absolutely encouraged to use that to your advantage. If you do, you'll quickly discover why the rules change so often. Preparation is everything! I'm Onno VKFLAB

World Telecommunication and Information Society Day marks the founding of the International Telecommunications Union in 1865. But since 1969, it has also celebrated the advances the industry has brought to society. Our Michael Hainsworth looks back at the last 50 years, and also to the future, with the ITU's Doreen Bogdan-Martin and learns that the biggest challenge for the next 50 years is closing the digital divide COVID-19 clearly exposed. 

Richard Hill has a doctorate in statistics from Harvard and spent a decade with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) dealing with numbering and tariffing issues, network operations, and economic and policy issues. Today on POWER PLAYS, he speaks with Ayden Férdeline about whether the ITU is fit for purpose and how it could evolve in the future.

After the deep dive on ransomware payments and how to beat back this latest crime wave, we spend several minutes in the Rapid Rundown NOT talking about the Colonial Pipeline ransomware event. Instead, we jump into Google's renewed push for automatic enrollment in 2FA, I mean, 2SV. Hooray MFA!Links:Read the Ransomware Task Force Report (mentioned throughout the episode)See Bleeping Computer's coverage of Google's default 2SVBiographical notes:Megan Stifel is Executive Director, Americas, at the Global Cyber Alliance. She previously served as Cybersecurity Policy Director at Public Knowledge. Prior to her work with nonprofits Megan served as a Director for International Cyber Policy at the National Security Council and in the U.S. Department of Justice, including as Director for Cyber Policy in the National Security Division and as counsel in the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section.Ms. Stifel was previously in private practice, where she advised clients on sanctions and FCPA compliance. Before law school, Ms. Stifel worked for the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. She received a Juris Doctorate from the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University, and a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, from the University of Notre Dame. She is a partner with Social Venture Partners Charleston.Professor Ciaran Martin, CB, is Professor of Practice at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. He is also an adviser to Paladin Capital in the United States, and Garrison Technology Ltd in the United Kingdom.For six and a half years ending in the middle of 2020, Ciaran led the UK Government’s work on cybersecurity. This included establishing the National Cyber Security Centre in 2016. The UK NCSC is now recognized as one of the leading public authorities in the world for cybersecurity, and Ciaran has been running it for its first four years. During Ciaran’s tenure, the UK rose from eighth to first in the International Telecommunications Union’s Global Cybersecurity Index. The NCSC’s approach to intervening to make technology safer–and easier to use safely–as well as managing national level incidents proactively has been lauded around the world. Ciaran has been honored within the UK, Europe, the United States, and beyond for his groundbreaking efforts to combat cyber threats.Prior to running the NCSC, Ciaran held a series of senior roles in the UK Cabinet Office. As Director of Constitution, he oversaw the agreement for arrangements for the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014. He also served as Director of Security and Intelligence as well as head of the Cabinet Secretary’s office. Additionally, he has worked in the UK Treasury and National Audit Office. Originally from Northern Ireland, he holds a first-class degree in history from the University of Oxford.

Rahul Jha is a Program Officer at the International Telecommunications Union under the United Nations. He has done many various things in his life that have to do with Telecommunications. He has worked in numerous different companies including Nokia and Ericsson. Being a professional in his field, this interview touches upon different aspects of his job in the ITU.

An interview with Robin McNeil,  Engineering and Ground segment Manager at Great South where he oversees the space programmes.  Robin is called the "Dish Master" at the Awarua Ground Stations located in Invercargill.  In the past he has worked for Thermo Cell and the International Telecommunications Union. Robin has an honours degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Canterbury and a  BA in English from Massey University. He is a Fellow of IPENZ (Interprofessional Education NZ), Senior Member of IEEE, and a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit.In this interview, we are going to talk about Robin’s career journey and the importance of his ground station work at the bottom of the world in support of international space missions around the globe.Additional Resources:Spacecraft Operations by Uhlig, Thomas, Sellmaier, Florian, Schmidhuber, Michael (Eds.)Hosted by: Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom, Co-Founder, SpaceBase Music: reCreation by airtone (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons (3.0) If you like our work, please consider donating to SpaceBase through The Gift Trust or RSF Social Finance (for US charitable donations) and indicate "SpaceBase" gift account.

NewsWest for Sunday 17th May is the contesting edition, and it goes out under the callsign AX6ARN. We’re using the AX prefix today because it’s the International Telecommunications Union world telecommunications day and is also known as World Telecommunication and Information Society Day. We take a look at a few contests coming up over the next few months, with a note from Trent, the contest manager for the upcoming VK Shires Contest. Chris VK3QB Reminds us about the Welcome to Amateur Radio Guide, the Reverse Beacon Network Grants program on offer from FISTS Down Under, and he announces a new video on Ferrites at QRM dot Guru There’s new award for CW operators that’s open now, for a month, - the Stay Home award. We have Roys Helpline, and we’ll take a look at which meetings are on this week NewsWest invites contributions to the news programme. You can send contributions by email to newswest@vk6.net You'll find links to resources on the vk6.net website where you'll also find information on where to hear the news, where to download it, how to rebroadcast this news and how to register your callbacks. If you want to join in, you can. Send an email to newswest@vk6.net and we'll be happy to respond. Send your stories, tall or true, audio production, scripts, events, updates, membership information, meeting announcements, AGM alerts, contests, swap-meets and more to us and we'll happily present your contribution on-air. Please register your callback, either on-air, or on-line. Visit vk6.net and click on the callback button. Originating in Perth Western Australia NewsWest is produced by WA Amateur Radio News for listeners on-air, on-line and on-demand. NewsWest audio (mp3) is available for download from our website, vk6.net. Click on the “LISTEN” tab. Whichever way you're listening, whether you're a licensed radio amateur or not, experienced or just a beginner, old or young, thanks for being here and thanks for joining us. Get your copy: http://vk6.net/news/ NewsWest is broadcast and relayed across VK6 and far beyond by many transmitters and operators. Details can be found on vk6.net. The main VK6 NewsWest broadcast occurs at 09:30 WST (01:30 UTC). If you'd like to broadcast this news in your local area, you can. There are no restrictions on broadcasting NewsWest, other than that you must broadcast it as supplied without any modification. We ask that broadcasters advise us that they're transmitting the news. Our address is newswest@vk6.net Producer: Bob VK6POP Folge direkt herunterladen

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I have a new callsign, it's exciting, special, kind of strange, to be known as something other than VK6FLAB. It's hard to overstate how much of your identity as a radio amateur is linked to your callsign. It's a strange phenomenon to those who are not amateurs, or who have only just joined the community and are still learning to remember what callsign they have. We think of callsigns as semi-permanent fixtures, but realistically they're far from that. In your life as an amateur you'll operate many callsigns, even if you never change your own. When you're operating the local club-station, you'll use that callsign, or when you're participating in a special event, say an activation of an island, or some remote DX station, or when you get on air to make noise in another country. Some stations use special contesting callsigns, either for speed, or to commemorate another amateur. There are those who collect callsigns like badges, others only ever register one and keep it for the rest of their life. There are provisions for applying for callsigns for short duty operation, sometimes as little as 24 hours, to mark a significant event or activation. For example, in 2013 we registered VI6PROF as a special callsign for the then Chief Scientist of Western Australia, Professor Lyn Beazley, who used that callsign for two hours after dinner during the annual conference held in VK6 that year. There are callsigns registered for marking the end of Polio, VI6POLIO, 100 years of the Wireless Institute of Australia VI100WIA. VK100MARCONI commemorated the first direct wireless message from the UK to Australia. There are callsigns registered for activating an island, like VK6WDI to activate Woody Island between the 9th and the 12th of November 2012, or VK6CHI for the Cheyene Island activation in 2007. Special callsigns are a global phenomenon. The Straight Key Century Club operates K3Y. K1A gets used by amateurs throughout the USA for many different events, from Boy Scout camps through to the America Recycles Day, from the Georgia QSO party to the ARRL Field Day. The 2012 Olympic Games in the United Kingdom were celebrated with 2012L and 2012W callsigns. RG22RQ was for the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. As with anything rare, there's an active community that collects it. For special callsigns, there are amateurs who collect by trying to make contact with an elusive call, confirm their contact and receive a QSL Card to decorate their shack with. In Australia, three times a year, on Australia Day, the 26th of January, on ANZAC Day, the 25th of April and on ITU Day, the 17th of May, a licensed amateur gets a special callsign to commemorate those special days in the calendar. Australia Day is the official national day of Australia, marking the anniversary of the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet of British ships at Port Jackson. ANZAC Day is the national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand that broadly commemorates all Australians and New Zealanders who served and died in all wars conflicts and peacekeeping operations. It's marked on the anniversary of the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli in 1915. ITU Day is the World Telecommunication and Information Society Day, commemorating the foundation of the International Telecommunications Union on the 17th of May, 1865. On each of these three dates, radio amateurs in Australia can replace their VK prefix with AX and use their special new callsign on-air to make contact anywhere around the world. So, for now, I'm Onno AX6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Morse Code is a way of communicating with people across the globe using dits and dahs and the spaces between them to convey a message. It's no longer required to get an Amateur License, but that doesn't mean that it's not useful, in fact, far from it, Morse is still heavily used in this hobby. I've been attempting to learn Morse code for quite some time. To do this I was told, time and time again, over and over, ad nauseam, that Morse is an Auditory Language. I was told that the way to success was to listen before sending, to be able to decode before ever touching a key and to learn with tapes. I also was told that if I learned it slowly, I'd run into trouble later on when I wanted to hear a beacon, which identifies itself with much faster Morse Code. Morse is an interesting phenomenon. We describe it in words in day-to-day terminology as having dots and dashes, which is how the International Telecommunications Union, the ITU defines it, but I have been assured that I should think of it in terms of dits and dahs, because that more closely mimics the sound of the language, and from my current experience, I have to agree. This is an audio language and it's defined in terms of how long a dit takes to transmit. A dit is one time unit. A dah is three dits. The space between a dit and a dah within one letter is one dit. The space between two letters is three dits and the space between two words is seven dits. I'm not expecting you to learn that right here and now, just pointing out that there is a definition of how this is supposed to work. If you make a dit last longer, everything else lasts longer, so determining how fast you're sending something is not simple to do, unless there's a standard. Of course there's a standard. The way that the speed in Morse is defined, is by counting how many times a standard word can be sent per minute. The Paris standard uses the word PARIS, because it is precisely 50 dits in terms of timing. There's another word, CODEX, which has 60 dits, so the two Words Per Minute are different depending on which standard you use. And to make things even more interesting, some people measure with 5 dits between words where the ITU specifies 7 dits between words. So, speed is variable, depending on who's measuring. The ITU doesn't specify which is right, but it gets better. As I said, this is an audio language, so you need to listen to it to learn it. Over the years it's been hammered into me, don't write Morse, don't use dits and dahs, listen, listen, listen. I did. At 25 Words per Minute, at what ever standard that was calculated, I can now hear Morse, that is, I can detect the gaps between letters and words and I can hear the rhythm of the code. Great, so I'm done, right? Not so fast. While I can hear the individual letters, I still don't actually know what a G sounds like, or what makes the letter X, or an Open Parenthesis, or a Question Mark. Easy, look them up, learn the sound, done. Morse Code is standard, right? Right? Seriously, Morse Code is standard, right? No. Not so much, not even a little bit. If you search the globe for Morse Code Charts so you can look up a Question Mark you'll end up with hundreds of different charts. Everyone agrees the letter A or Alpha is dit-dah, but they cannot even agree that N, November, is dah-dit. Some show the difference between an open and a close parenthesis, others use the same character. There's charts that put dits-and-dahs inside the letters of the alphabet, but don't specify in which order the parts are heard. The Wireless Institute of Australia doesn't even appear to bother specifying, the FISTS Down Under Morse Preservation Society doesn't show a copy, the ARRL has an abomination on their website that you cannot even link to, the ACMA defines the end of transmission as a cross and then there are the special ones, survival charts and power point slides and using words to describe a symbol, so you can know that a fraction bar is a dah-dit-dit-dah-dit, but you don't actually know what it looks like. You'll be pleased to learn that the ITU actually publishes a document, ITU-R M.1677-1, last updated in October of 2009, that specifies the International Morse Code. It goes into great detail on what characters are defined, how to start and stop transmissions, how to transmit things like percentages, what to do if you need to send a multiplication symbol, inverted commas, minutes and second signs, fractions and as a bonus it has the phrase that this document and I quote: "should be used to define the Morse code characters and their applications in the radiocommunication services". Nothing quite like a standard that should be adopted, rather than must be adopted. The ITU also tells us that "the code needs to be updated from time-to-time to meet the needs of the radiocommunication services". The French word "arobase", which in English is pronounced "at" and looks like the letter a with a circle, used today in an email address was added to Morse Code in 2002 by the French General Committee on Terminology, quick off the mark for a symbol that appeared on a typewriter in 1889 and first used in an email address in 1971, but if you look for an Exclamation Mark, an Ampersand, a Dollar Symbol, a Semi-Colon or an Underscore, you won't find anything about it in the ITU standard. Oh, here's a fun fact. The ITU document says: "No part of this publication may be reproduced, by any means whatsoever, without written permission of ITU." - so apparently I can't actually tell you that a dit-dit-dit-dah-dit-dah means that this is the end of my transmission. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Clara Luz Álvarez, nonresident scholar at the Mexico Center and  professor at the Universidad Panamericana, discusses the telecommunications reform of 2013 in the context of the current presidential election and the NAFTA renegotiations. She previously served as the rapporteur for the International Telecommunications Union’s study group of information technology accessibility for people with disabilities, and as commissioner for Mexico’s Federal Telecommunications Commission (Cofetel). For more information on the upcoming elections in Mexico, visit the Mexico Center's Election Resource page. For comments and questions please email mexicocenter@rice.edu  

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever considered the infrastructure that exists to make it possible to tune to 7.090 MHz, call CQ and make contact with anyone on the planet? In a world where we as radio amateurs share spectrum with radio and television broadcasters, mobile phones, wireless networks, satellites, GPS, drones, wireless headphones, radar, boating, aviation, citizen band, garage door openers, fitness trackers and any other wireless gadget imaginable, not to mention radio astronomy, microwave ovens, meteorological aids, inter and intra car communication, autonomous cars, trains and more. The world clamours for spectrum and in among those allocations we find the amateur bands. There are 24 million odd people in Australia, a few normal people, but mostly odd and about 14000 radio amateur license holders, that's about 0.06% of the population. It's extraordinary that in the last 100 years of radio spectrum allocation we have access to the bands we have. It's easy to forget that in the rarefied air of amateur radio where we have access to an astonishing amount of spectrum how unique we really are. Not only do we have a situation where we have access to bands, this is mostly global access. There are exceptions and while bands don't exactly line up, for example 7.090 MHz in Australia and the UK is an SSB calling frequency, but in the United States this is a CW, RTTY and data frequency, still amateur radio, but not the same mode. How this allocation exists is a combination of being the first mover, that is, radio amateurs came along and used it before anyone else had any use for the spectrum and the existence of the International Amateur Radio Union, the IARU. The IARU is a topic in and of itself, but in essence it's an organisation that exists and has done since 1925 due to radio amateurs combining their efforts. The IARU consists of over 160 member countries which are represented by their peak body, in Australia the WIA, the UK has the RSGB and the US has the ARRL. So, if you're a member of one of those organisations, you in turn are represented at the IARU where volunteers represent you and me on the world stage. The IARU has organised the world into three regions that correspond with the International Telecommunications Union, Region 1 is Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Russia, Region 2 is the Americas, Region 3 is the rest, Asia and the Pacific, that includes India and China. At some level discussion about the IARU, the role it plays and the processes it has and services it offers is a dry and boring administrative slog. It's not sexy, it's not thrilling, but every once in a while I think it would be a great idea to consider what the world might look like without the IARU and what our hobby might look like had this organisation not existed. There are some public activities that the IARU engages in, the Beacon Project, the HF World Championships and the Worked All Continents award. There's the Monitoring System and other activities such as the Amateur Radio Direction Finding or ARDF championships. The public relations face aside, much of the activity of the IARU is invisible, going to meetings, making proposals, keeping abreast of new technology and threats to radio spectrum, participating in working and study groups and the administration of all this volunteer effort. Next time you call CQ and a station on the other side of the planet answers, consider some of the invisible forces at work that make it possible. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Spectrum, the airwaves used to send communications signals, such as for mobile phones or wireless Internet, is an important topic that not many people know about. Currently, access to spectrum is sold by governments around the world to large companies, who then have the right to exclude others from access to it, whether or not they actually are using it. The International Telecommunications Union, part of the United Nations, helps develop broadband rules for its members, but members are not required to follow them. The Dynamic Spectrum Alliance is a global organization made up of various companies, universities, and other organizations who are committed to allowing increased unlicensed and shared access to unused spectrum frequencies, of which there are many. They believe that doing so will increase innovation across a number of industries, as well as increased broadband services. Kalpak discusses how this group came about, the challenges they face in changing the minds of regulators and politicians around the world, and the future of global telecommunications. For more information, visit www.dynamicspectrumalliance.org.

  The Power of WiFi for Business and Communities The potential for WiFi can't be understated. WiFi is beneficial not only for businesses, but also for communities that have traditionally lacked access. In this episode, Edgar Figueroa of the WiFi alliance helps us understand the different types of spectrum. Edgar also describes what WiFi is and how WiFi is playing an increasingly important role in telecom policy. Bio As president and CEO of Wi-Fi Alliance (@WifiAlliance), Edgar Figueroa has led an unprecedented period of growth for Wi-Fi®. Wi-Fi Alliance has grown to more than 700 member companiesUnder Edgar's leadership. He has also maintained an aggressive development roadmap and adopted a vision of “Connecting everyone and everything, everywhere.” Edgar forged numerous strategic partnerships to facilitate penetration of Wi-Fi into established and emerging markets. Edgar also defined the Wi-Fi Alliance Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ program development framework. He also guided the launch of several generations of interoperable Wi-Fi programs. These programs have proliferated Wi-Fi into mass markets such as mobile and consumer electronics. Prior to Wi-Fi Alliance, Edgar was at Ridgeway Systems & Software (now Cisco). He was instrumental in delivering the industry's first session border controller. He also helped develop the H.460.18 and H.460.19 International Telecommunications Union standards for secure network traversal. Before Ridgeway, Edgar held product management and engineering roles at 3M Company. Edgar is a veteran of the United States Navy in which he served in a fighter pilot training squadron. Further, he received numerous awards including Sailor of the Year. Edgar has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, Austin Community College, and various community programs in Austin Texas. The Hispanic Scholarship Fund inducted  Edgar into its Hall of Fame. Edgar is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a Masters in Technology Commercialization, and undergraduate degrees with honors in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics. Resources WiFi Alliance Younger Next Year by Chris Crowley News Roundup SEC warns the public on internet currencies The Securities and Exchange Commission warned the public last week about potential internet currency offering (ICO) scams. Internet currencies like Bitcoin have been on an upward trend lately, with Bitcoin trading at over $4,000. The SEC is worried about companies that prey on the public by "pumping" prices for new products related to internet currencies. China moved on Monday to outlaw internet currency trading. Eugene Kim reports for CNBC. Uber faces bribery law investigation Douglass McMillan reported for the Wall Street Journal last week that the Justice Department has begun a preliminary investigation into Uber's potential violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Uber experienced rapid foreign expansion under former CEO Travis Kalanick, and the DOJ apparently suspects that bribery may have been factor. Uber's new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, formerly the CEO of Expedia, took the helm of Uber last week. New America Fellow ousted after criticizing Google A New America Foundation scholar was ousted from the think tank after he criticized Google's market dominance. Barry Lynn, who ran New America's Open Market's program, praised the European Union's recent $2.7 billion fine against Google for allegedly favoring its own search results over its competitors. Last week, New America let Lynn go, along with several other staffers. Lynn says Google, which has donated some $21 million to New America in recent years, is pulling the strings. Lynn followed up by launching a separate organization that is "going to make sure Google doesn't get away with this". Kenneth Vogel reports for the New York Times. Tillerson to close State Department cyber division Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced his plans to close the State Department's cyber division. Tillerson made the revelation in a letter to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker . The division is responsible for protecting the United States' cyber security interests abroad.  Tillerson says he intends to roll the cyber division into a business and economic affairs bureau. Morgan Chalfant reports in the Hill. Net Neutrality hearing delayed The House Energy & Commerce Committee hearing on net neutrality that was scheduled for September 7th has been delayed. Not a single one of the eight tech companies the Committee invited responded to the invitation to testify. Edward Graham at Morning Consult reports. DHS warns of Harvey scams The Department of Homeland Security warned the public last week about possible scams related to Hurricane Harvey relief efforts. The agency warned about phishing scams and other malicious activity designed to take advantage of good samaritans making email donations.  

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today we have a standard for our on-air phonetic alphabet - technically it's called a spelling alphabet, but I digress. As you should be aware if you're a licensed Amateur, we use the so-called standard phonetic alphabet. It's used and defined by several organisations, including the International Telecommunications Union, the International Civil Aviation Organisation and NATO. It should come as no surprise that each of those organisations defines their own alphabet. It just so happens that today each of these definitions is the same, but that hasn't always been the case. In the United Kingdom, Alpha went through Apples, Ack, Ace, Able an Affirm. In the United States, Alpha has been Able, Affirmative, Afirm, Able, Alfa. In Amateur Radio we've heard America, Amsterdam and even Australia. All that for just the letter that we spell as Alpha. If that's not enough, try on Adams, Adam, Anatole, Anton, Ancona, Antonio, Anna, Aarne, Adana, Aveiro, Amor, Ana and Avala. No wonder we have a few different spellings that we hear on air when we're busy spelling our callsign to the other station. Where does that leave you? Well, the ACMA specifies in their amateur operating procedures the International Phonetic Alphabet and it is recommended for use by amateur station licensees. Note that it's recommended, not mandated. My best advice is to learn and love the standard phonetic alphabet. It's been almost standard since 1956. That's not to say you won't hear me call Victor King Six Florida London America Boston on occasion, when I'm trying to talk to some station that hasn't a clue that I have a legitimate callsign with a four letter suffix and they need to be sure that I know that it's real. The recommended procedure when dealing with a Pirate is to go silent. You won't believe how many stations went quiet whilst I was working my latest contest. Those four letters do cause some grief, but I understand, it was only introduced recently, as close as 2005, so it's understandable that not everyone has heard of an Australian Foundation call, let alone get their head around the standard phonetic alphabet. I'm Onno Vice Kilogramme, Soxisix, Frank Loves Amsterdam Beer

Wikihood mobile app, installing new antivirus, Send to Kindle mobile app, auction sites for developers, Profiles in IT (David Ross Cheriton, billionaire Stanford professor angel investor), Internet has evolved into gated communities (Facebook vs Amazon vs Google vs Apple), HTML5 vs Native Apps (Apps will dominate in the near term, HTML5 will ultimately win because it is platform agnostic and open source), International Telecommunications Union tries to control Internet (Internet Society fought for independence from UN, Internet safe for now), and gifts for geeks. This show originally aired on Saturday, December 22, 2012, at 9:00 AM EST on WFED (1500 AM). This show originally aired on Saturday, December 22, 2012, at 9:00 AM EST on WFED (1500 AM).

Wikihood mobile app, installing new antivirus, Send to Kindle mobile app, auction sites for developers, Profiles in IT (David Ross Cheriton, billionaire Stanford professor angel investor), Internet has evolved into gated communities (Facebook vs Amazon vs Google vs Apple), HTML5 vs Native Apps (Apps will dominate in the near term, HTML5 will ultimately win because it is platform agnostic and open source), International Telecommunications Union tries to control Internet (Internet Society fought for independence from UN, Internet safe for now), and gifts for geeks. This show originally aired on Saturday, December 22, 2012, at 9:00 AM EST on WFED (1500 AM). This show originally aired on Saturday, December 22, 2012, at 9:00 AM EST on WFED (1500 AM).

The internet has become as much a part of our daily lives as driving and eating. But who actually controls the internet? The International Telecommunications Union or the ITU is the United Nations agency responsible for information and communication technologies. Recently the ITU hosted the World Conference on International Communication where 178 countries met to update a treaty on internet security originally signed in 1988. However, many people have voiced their concern that this conference was just an opportunity for powerful nations and multi-national corporations to seize control of the internet. 2SER’s Joel Moss spoke to Associate Law Professor, Melissa de Zwart, from the University of Adelaide, about the World Conference and the fight for internet control.

Preventing the United Nations from having power to regulate online content is the focus as Phil Corwin, Counsel to the Internet Commerce Association, returns to discuss with Bennet the controversy over the upcoming 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications organized by the International Telecommunications Union.Plus, Big Data and its increased scrutiny by both Congress and the FTC as we hear from Bill Sullivan, Vice President and General Manager for Public Sector for Informatica.

Our very special guest for this podcast is the remarkable Vinton G. Cerf. You’ll be fascinated to hear Vint talk about the origins of the Internet, including the people he worked with who made it possible. Taking us right up to the minute, Vint describes his latest work around creating the protocols for the Inter-Planetary and even the Inter-Galactic Internet! Currently, Vint Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for the company. Widely known as a "Father of the Internet," Vint is the co-designer with Robert Kahn of TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the Internet. In 1997, President Clinton recognized their work with the U.S. National Medal of Technology. In 2005, Vint and Bob received the highest civilian honor bestowed in the U.S., the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It recognizes the fact that their work on the software code used to transmit data across the Internet has put them "at the forefront of a digital revolution that has transformed global commerce, communication, and entertainment." From 1994-2005, Vint served as Senior Vice President at MCI. Prior to that, he was Vice President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), and from 1982-86 he served as Vice President of MCI. During his tenure with the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from 1976-1982, Vint played a key role leading the development of Internet and Internet-related data packet and security technologies. Since 2000, Vint has served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and he has been a Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1998. He served as founding president of the Internet Society (ISOC) from 1992-1995 and was on the ISOC board until 2000. Vint is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, AAAS, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum and the National Academy of Engineering. Vint has received numerous awards and commendations in connection with his work on the Internet, including the Marconi Fellowship, Charles Stark Draper award of the National Academy of Engineering, the Prince of Asturias award for science and technology, the Alexander Graham Bell Award presented by the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf, the A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computer Machinery, the Silver Medal of the International Telecommunications Union, and the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, among many others.He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA and more than a dozen honorary degrees. So sit back and enjoy the show – it’s not often that we get such an insightful insider’s view of the Internet.

In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Internet Archive and I’m posting each episode here for posterity. This second episode of Consumed by Technology focused on the economics of moving around information on the Internet; it aired on July 16, 1996. Karen Mair was the host. In 1837, a retired school teacher named Rowland Hill wrote an essay which shook the world of “moving information from place to place,” an essay which is perhaps even more relevant today than it was when he wrote it. Show Notes These are the original links that I released with the episode; each is a link to the Internet Archive’s cache of the site at the time. About Rowland Hill and the Mail Royal Mail History Mass Postal Service after 150 Years: A Review Essay The Post Office Canada Post United States Postal Service The Royal Mail The Phone Company Island Tel Bell Canada AT&T; International Telecommunications Union Telecom Digest and Archives Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission Paying for the Internet Basic accounts fees at PEINet, Sympatico, Atlantic Connect (all here on Prince Edward Island) and AT&T WorldNet, Mindspring, The Well (all bigger U.S. Internet providers) How big is this? Anne of Green Gables The Canadian Constitution Transcript INTRO: In 1837, a retired school teacher named Rowland Hill wrote an essay which shook the world of “moving information from place to place,” an essay which is perhaps even more relevant today than it was when he wrote it. To talk about this retired school teacher and about “moving information around from place to place,” Peter Rukavina joins me now in another in the series “Consumed by Technology.” QUESTION: What exactly was in this essay that shook up the world? ANSWER: Well, in 1837, Rowland Hill was living in England after retiring from a career as a teacher and administrator. He was quite an eclectic man; he was know for his somewhat innovative teaching methods and his interests in printing, astronomy, mathematics, and transportation. And in that year, 1837, he produced a pamphlet called “Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability”. And, quite simply, the theories he forwarded in this pamphlet revolutionised the postal system, not only in England, but around the world. And not only in 1837, but in ways which live on today. You see up until that time, the cost of sending a letter was based on a rather complex set of factors like the distance the letter was to travel and the number sheets of paper you sent and so on. And in fact the cost was usually charged to the person receiving a letter, not the person sending it. This all resulted in the need for something of an overwhelming postal bureaucracy: not only did the people delivering the mail have to charge for every letter they delivered, but they had to charge a different amount for each one. And that amount had to be figured out. The system required large number of people, cost so much that is was hard for the common person to use it, and was just generally inefficient. And then Rowland Hill can along with three relatively simple suggestions: Postal rates should be lower. The cost of sending a letter should be the same, regardless of distance. Costs should be paid by the sender, not the recipient Although Hill faced some political challenges getting his ideas across, in the end, nothing could stop common sense and by 1840 uniform postal rates, and postage stamps purchased by the sender, were in place across England. Within 25 years his ideas had spread around the world. What we end up with, 159 years later, is a system here in Canada where you can send a standard letter to any of 12 million addresses in the country, for just 45 cents. QUESTION: So Rowland Hill gave us a world with cheap, universal postal rates? ANSWER: Exactly. And not only that, but his ideas changed the model for the way that information was moved from to place to place. Now that we live in an “information economy” where we’re moving around more and more information and less and less tractors and sheet metal and rolls of carpet, how we pay to send and receive information becomes only more important. Imagine, for example, a world where it cost $73 to send a letter to Toronto. Or what if international telephone calls were free? Or we had to pay for Island Morning by the minute? What if it cost five dollars to run a TV commercial during Compass? In a world where money is so important to us, how we pay to move information dramatically affects how we deal with that information. Generally, the cheaper it is, the more we use it. Now, in addition to the sort of “all you can eat” way we pay for postal service — one fee, as much information as you can stuff in an envelope — there are generally three factors used to charge for moving information from place to place: how much, how far, and how long. Which of these is in place for a particular “information moving device” tends to determine how we use that device in our daily lives. QUESTION: Well what about telephone service as an example? Telephone service is an interesting case because the way we pay for it changes depending on where we’re calling. Local calls are “all you can eat” and long distance calls are charged using a combination of time and distance — not unlike postal service before 1837. Now think of the difference in the way we make local phone calls versus the way we make long distance calls. In any given day, I might make 20 or 30 local phone calls. Because I don’t have to pay for each one, I don’t even think about picking up the phone at the drop of a hat to make a local call. Long distance calls, however, are a different matter. Because I have to pay for each one, even thinking about making a long distance call is a different kind of thing altogether from making a local call, to say nothing of the experience of actually making a long distance call with the clock silently ticking all the time in the background. Not it sort of seems a little silly to be describing all of this is such intimate detail; it seems like such a natural part of our lives that we just take it for granted that to call across the street is free and to call Halifax costs. But sometimes it’s useful to step back for a minute and realize that all of these distinctions are ones we’ve allowed to be put in place; take these arbitrary distinctions as to where is “near” and where is “far” and multiply their effect over millions of phone calls over the years, and you’re talking about a pretty major issue. And an issue which not only affects the size of our phone bills at the end of the month but which can determine how communities relate to each other. Take North and South Granville, for example, close to Hunter River in the middle of the Island. South Granville is in the Hunter River “964” telephone exchange and North Granville, just over the hill, really, is in the New London “886” exchange. Now I’ve been told that the natural inclination of people in South Granville is towards Hunter River and Charlottetown, both local calls, whereas the natural inclination of people in North Granville is towards Kensington and Summerside, again, both local calls. As a result, the natural inclination of North and South Granville is not towards each other. It seems like such a simple and insignificant thing on one level, but when you start to think about all of the friendships and marriages and business arrangements that have been subtly affected by this over the years, it looms pretty large in the grander scheme of things. And again, it’s really all about how we charge for moving information from place to place. QUESTION: You mentioned the “information economy”… how do things like the Internet fit into all of this? ANSWER: Well, although the Internet has been around, in one form or another, for over 20 years, it’s only in the last couple that people like you and me have started to use it. And so how we pay for using it — what “information moving” model will apply is only in the process of being figured out. By far the dominant model right now is something which shares something in common with long distance phone service and something in common with the revolutionary postal system of Rowland Hill. In most cases when you sign up for an Internet account you pay a certain fixed monthly fee which allows you to spend a certain number of hours connected to the Internet… $30 for 30 hours, for example. Any time that you spend online over that fixed monthly amount is billed by the hour. QUESTION: So the clock is always ticking? ANSWER: Yes indeed, and, as you might imagine, that affects the way that people use their time online. The Internet is often compared to the public library; they’re both places where lots of information is stored and organized. Think of the feeling you get from wandering around a public library: you might wander over to the magazine section and read the latest issue of the New Yorker, browse though the Irish travel book section for a while, maybe try and find the latest John Grisham novel. Because using public libraries is free, and because you can take as much time as you want to find what you need, there’s a certain kind of freedom that libraries bring to gathering information. On the “billed by the hour” Internet, however, that freedom is gone. Although you can wander around the Internet in much the same way you can wander around a library, and although you’re not paying for the actual information you’re browsing, there’s always that feeling that the clock is ticking. It’s not unlike the feeling that you get making a long distance telephone call. One of the reasons I know this is true is because I’ve experienced another way of using the Internet, a model which is gradually becoming more common, and that is paying a fixed monthly fee for unlimited Internet use. This is a model very similar to the way we pay for cable television; in essence, “all you can eat.” Without that invisible clock ticking in the background, “surfing the net” is an entirely different experience. QUESTION: Do you expect that this “all you can eat” approach is going to be the way of the future? Well, it’s certainly preferable from a consumer’s point of view, but it also makes it hard for someone in the Internet business to make any money. The third possible model for paying for the Internet, and the one which perhaps makes the most amount of sense for someone in the Internet business and the least amount of sense for consumers, is the “pay by the byte” model. This is similar to the way we pay for telegrams: by the word. In essence, we would pay for the actual amount of information we browsed on the Internet, no matter how long it took. If we look up two books in the Library of Congress online catalogue, it might cost us 5 cents. I we look up ten books, it might cost us 25 cents. Just to give you some idea of the relative size of pieces of information: the book Anne of Green Gables weighs in at just under half a million bytes — one byte equals one letter or space in the book. The entire Canadian Constitution is about 100,000 bytes long while the American Declaration of Independence is about 7,000 bytes long. The Encyclopaedia Britannica article on dandelions is 508 bytes long. Now remember, in this “pay by the byte” model, the clock isn’t ticking, but the “information meter” is. It’s more the bookstore way of doing things than the public library way of doing things. The “pay by the byte” way of charging for Internet use isn’t really common for consumers yet, but it’s becoming an increasingly common model for charging businesses for Internet access. QUESTION: So the Internet will be “pay by the minute,” “all you can eat,” or “pay by the byte?” ANSWER: In the end it will probably be some combination of the three. No matter what the final model is, however, its going to have a dramatic affect on the role that the Internet plays in our life. Just to introduce one final wrench in the works: there’s a lot of talk now about “convergence” — about telephone and television and radio and the Internet all merging into one sort of “digital appliance.” When you hear people talking about a “set top box” this is what they’re talking about. Things start to get really weird when you start thinking about telephone service — the new “digital appliance” telephone service — being billed not by the minute or by distance like we’re used to, but by the amount of information that is communicated. “Hello mother, I’m doing well” might cost you a tenth of a cent, “Hi Mom, all okay!” might cost you half as much. We could end up with a whole generation of people talking in a weird abbreviated code. QUESTION: We’d have old Rowland Hill rolling over in his grave… ANSWER: Indeed. Just remember, the next time that you pick up the phone or send a letter or pick up the newspaper, or watch TV, you’re helping to move information from place to place. And how you’re paying for it probably has a lot more to do with how you’re doing it than you realize. EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston. He’ll be back next week for another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”