Zero Retries 0190
2025-02-21 — Update on M17 Foundation - Donations, 2025 Conference, AREDN Updates - New Protocol and Modes, ESPARGOS Wi-Fi Sensing Array, Introducing The Firehose
Zero Retries is an independent newsletter promoting technological innovation that is occurring in Amateur Radio, and Amateur Radio as (literally) a license to experiment with and learn about radio technology. Radios are computers - with antennas! Now in its fourth year of publication, with 2500+ subscribers.
About Zero Retries
Steve Stroh N8GNJ, Editor
Web version of this issue - https://www.zeroretries.org/p/zero-retries-0190
In this issue:
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Commentary by Editor Steve Stroh N8GNJ
Paid Subscribers Update
My thanks to Prefers to Remain Anonymous 65 for upgrading from a free subscriber to Zero Retries to an Annual Paid Subscriber this past week!
Financial support from Zero Retries readers is a significant vote of support for the continued publication of Zero Retries.
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Hamshack Hotline Extension 6103420
My Hamshack Hotline extension is now active and I’m looking forward to using it to chat with others over Voice Over Internet Protocol.
I was asked “what’s the elevator pitch for Hamshack Hotline?” Reasonable question! This is my perspective:
Hamshack Hotline is a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) telephone switch that is operated by volunteers for the benefit of Amateur Radio Operators. To qualify for an extension to be allocated, you must provide Hamshack Hotline with an “official” copy of your Amateur Radio license. There’s no direct involvement with radio in the basic service of Hamshack Hotline (it’s all operated via Internet). But as I mentioned in the previous issue,
It’s cool that there’s some crossover between Hamshack Hotline and AREDN Meshphone. There’s also connectivity between Hamshack Hotline and AllStarLink. Experimenting with both of those will have to wait for some additional Amateur Time Units (ATUs) to be allocated.
I can’t promise I’ll answer every Hamshack Hotline call (currently there’s only one phone at my office area in (frigid, for most of this past week…) N8GNJ Labs, but feel free to give me a call to say Hello.
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Nice Mention in Amateur Radio Weekly 369
Amateur Radio Weekly 369 featured an article of mine from Zero Retries 0188 - The Coming 21st Century Amateur Radio Networking Revolution:
Amateur Radio is poised to experience the equivalent of the Packet Radio Revolution, but in the 21st century, with 21st century technology.
I’m grateful for ARW Editor (and Zero Retries Pseudostaffer) Cale Mooth K4HCK for mentions of Zero Retries. The ZR subscriber count always experiences a noticeable uptick after such mentions.
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Utah Digital Communications Conference This Weekend
For the second year in a row, life events conspired that I could not attend the UDCC (including virtually). I’ve heard good things about this conference, and it looks like an interesting set of seminars for the 2025 event. It would be great to meet up with the Zero Retries Interesting folks in that part of North America! On Saturday I’ll be thinking about all the fun they’ll be having there, and hopefully we’ll see some video archives of the presentations. Perhaps in 2026, our Amateur Radio travel budget will be a little more accommodating.
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Returning to Shorts Season
Here at Zero Retries Galactic Headquarters and N8GNJ Labs, our four weeks or so of winter’ish weather (and nearly two weeks of snow remaining on the ground) has finally broken. Our winter’ish climate is surprisingly mild given that Bellingham is a mere 20 miles from (brrr…) Canada. This week has featured temps back in the 50s (F) and the usual gray overcast that maintains those temps this time of year. Not only has this weather made N8GNJ Labs (and my office) habitable again (due for an insulation, HVAC, and many other upgrades this year), but such temperatures allow me to return to my usual “work” uniform of T-shirt, light jacket, and shorts. Honestly, one of the very best perks of semi-retirement is wearing shorts1 most of the time.
The radio projects of the weekend are to test a beta version of software, and dust off my HamWAN microwave radio, change the dish antenna, and test out another piece of beta software on the HamWAN radio. And I really have to get online with VARA FM as that mode has finally begun to penetrate into usage here in Whatcom County. And of course, there are AREDN radios to flash with the latest firmware… and many other fun projects in my queue.
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Have a great weekend, all of you co-conspirators in Zero Retries Interesting Amateur Radio activities!
Steve N8GNJ
Update on M17 Foundation Activities
By Steve Stroh N8GNJ
Excerpts from the M17 Foundation web page
The M17 Project has created a modern digital voice and data / messaging system for VHF / UHF bands, based on open source technology. M17 was designed for Amateur Radio, by Amateur Radio. Notably, in my opinion, M17 makes explicit provisions for data and messaging in its protocol, and (unlike DMR) has been specified well enough for multiple implementations of data over M17. All of my activity to use digital voice going forward will be on M17, with perhaps some minor experimentation with D-Star (especially D-Star’s data capability).
The M17 Foundation is a new organization to guide and promote M17 technology and usage in Amateur Radio. The M17 Foundation is making progress behind the scenes, positioning itself for (hopefully) resuming development work on M17 and related technology in 2025. This is an update based on recent postings on the M17 Foundation website.
Direct Donations to M17 Foundation Now Available
The M17 Foundation now has a DONATE link at the top right of the M17 Foundation web page and the M17 Project page. Those links are a bit too subtle, in my opinion. In fact, I suggested that M17 Foundation set up a donation link, having completely overlooked that it already existed.
The link takes you to a PayPal page:
Donate to Fundacja M17
The future of M17 is in your hands. Donate now to secure our existence.
With some suggested amounts.
Apparently in Poland (where M17 Foundation is established), a not for profit or charitable organization cannot have “members” such as similar organizations in the US can. Thus all financial contributions to M17 Foundation are donations.
The future of M17 Foundation really is in the hands of us fans / supporters / users / enthusiasts of M17 technology at the moment through our donations. If we want to see M17 succeed and grow, a strong advocacy organization is needed to coordinate its growth into mainstream use and acceptance.
M17 Foundation / Project Status Update
Wojciech Kaczmarski:
Here’s a word of explanation behind the decision to establish M17 Foundation.
As of December 6th, 2024, the authoritative sources of information regarding the M17 Project are M17 Foundation – m17foundation.org (the legal entity guiding M17 development) and M17 Project – m17project.org (technical information for M17) web pages.
M17 Foundation manages these social media accounts:“M17 Foundation” Discord server: https://discord.gg/xC4ec8k9“@m17_project” on X: https://x.com/m17_project“@m17_project” on Mastodon: https://mastodon.radio/@m17_project“M17 Project (ham radio)” Facebook group
The group formerly known as the M17 Project (prior to December 6, 2024) has been completely dissolved. A number of reasons contributed to this:The group did not form any legal entity.The group suffered from loose organization and operated uncoordinated, sometimes working at cross purposes.Relying on external fiscal sponsors proved to be expensive, unreliable, and did not always “transparently pass through” grant funding to support M17 activities.Funds disbursal was not under legal, strict control.Our previous website, m17project.org, was hardly seeing any updates. Currently, the website is being maintained.
Most of the personnel based in the US, previously involved with M17, are not affiliated with the M17 Foundation. Also, unfortunately, some of the former M17 personnel decided to keep the assets purchased with grant funds, preventing the M17 Foundation from managing that equipment in alignment with its goals.
All grant funding for M17 through the end of 2024 has been completely disbursed. All the expenses related with the establishment of M17 Foundation (legal work, M17 logo registration, new website hosting) have, to date, been paid for with personal funds.
At this moment, the M17 Foundation needs donations from those who care about continuing the mission of M17: continuous development of a modern digital voice/data ecosystem for VHF/UHF bands, based on open source technology, specifically for amateur radio.
A roadmap of M17’s proposed goals and projects for 2025 and beyond (if sufficient funding is secured) will be published soon.
Future grant funding is not assured, and grant funding is not a long term solution for funding M17 Foundation’s work. The Foundation is investigating other (non-grant) funding sources.
The future of whether M17 Foundation will be able to continue the M17 development is in your hands. Please donate to M17 Foundation at the link below, so that we can continue our mission:
https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=4HTHZCS8UYPU6
M17 Conference 2025
The M17 Conference is planned for September 6-7 (full weekend). No schedule is available yet, but the event will most likely span two days: 9:00-16:00 on Saturday and 9:00-14:00 on Sunday. More details shall be published soon. The admission is free.
Location: Garnizonowy Klub Oficerski, Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki, Poland.
Presentations can be broad-spectrum, but should be radio related. Proposed topics include:M17 Protocolopen-source hardware/software development and sustainabilityreverse engineering and hackingGNU Radio usesdigital RF protocols for amateur radio; efficient use of spectrumamateur satellite communicationsamateur radio infrastructure (incl. Radio Access Networks)signal intelligence
We are currently accepting presentation and booth proposals. Please fill in and submit the form below only if you are interested in participating as a speaker or if you want to have a booth. Regular attendees do not need to register.
As the above indicates, the interests of the M17 Foundation, and the M17 Conference are not strictly confined to M17 technology.
On the linked page, there’s no mention (yet) of the potential of virtual attendance and presentations, live streaming the conference, or video recording for later viewing. There’s also no mention of potential corporate or other sponsorships. But this is a brand new conference, so it’s likely that such details will emerge in ample time prior to the conference.
It’s encouraging to see M17 Foundation “take charge of its destiny” in setting up its own technical conference. I think doing has a lot to recommend it for other technologies in Amateur Radio, especially now that the TAPR Digital Communications Conference, which acted as a showcase for new technologies and developments in Amateur Radio, has ceased.
To many in Amateur Radio, M17 “just isn’t that big a deal; it’s just yet another digital voice mode” (of several in use in Amateur Radio). Thus it’s hard to get past the “oh yeah, I heard about that a while ago” factor in getting recognition for current M17 activity at other Amateur Radio events. Thus, creating a dedicated conference that will showcase M17 technology is an effective way to work around that issue.
AREDN Updates
By Steve Stroh N8GNJ
Excerpts from the AREDN web page
Amateur Radio Emergency Digital Network (AREDN) is a software (firmware) upgrade for a number of Wi-Fi and Wireless ISP outdoor radio units that can form a self-organizing mesh network on microwave frequencies. The advantage of AREDN over other data systems for Amateur Radio is that AREDN is “native TCP/IP” and high speeds (10 Mbps and faster). AREDN is designed for Amateur Radio, by Amateur Radio and includes Amateur Radio features such as embedded callsigns, lack of encryption, ease of use (minimal configuration), etc. Thus most “Internet” systems (that don’t depend on “cloud services” can be used for Amateur Radio over AREDN networks, including high resolution cameras, Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) telephones, email, web pages, and other services.
The reference below to OLSR is Optimized Link State Routing, and a quick reading of the linked article makes the point that OLSR is optimized for mobile usage, which isn’t quite equivalent to the use case of AREDN; mountaintop and home station microwave nodes don’t move around much, so the “proactive” nature of OSLR isn’t really needed for AREDN.
In the discussion below of “Layer 2” versus “Layer 3”, see the Wikipedia article OSI model for a detailed explanation, specifically the “Layer architecture” chart.
Introducing a New Network Protocol
By the AREDN Development Team
The AREDN team is introducing a new networking technology into the nightly builds with the ultimate long term goal of replacing OLSR.
OLSR has many faults which AREDN has lived with for a long time. For the last couple of years we’ve been looking at alternatives and making incremental steps in the codebase to allow us to introduce something new. We can finally do that by adding Babel (https://www.irif.fr/~jch/software/babel/) to AREDN.
Babel has a number of qualities which make it good for AREDN. First, it’s a loop free protocol so, regardless of how the network is changing, routing loops will never form in the network. Second, it’s primarily a reactive protocol which sends changes to neighbors when needed rather than broadcasting its state continually. Third, the protocol understands the difference between wired, wireless, and tunneled links – the three link types AREDN utilizes. Fourth, it’s a layer-3 routing protocol, which integrates easily with how AREDN already operates. Fifth, it’s highly configurable which will allow an optimal setup for our use case. Finally, it’s simple.
We considered a number of options, and another contender was B.A.T.M.A.N. Advanced. Unfortunately this protocol is not a good fit for AREDN as it primarily focuses on level-2 wireless networking. AREDN needs a protocol which can do more. We evaluated how we could use BATMAN and it wasn’t simple, efficient or pretty.
If you’re interested in more comparisons between Babel and other options there are many good presentations on YouTube. [Babel Doesn't Care + Slides - BattleMeshV8] is a great primer on Babel itself.
Babel will roll out into the nightly builds alongside OLSR and the two will operate in parallel. If there is a Babel-only path between two nodes in the network, then Babel routes will be used to send traffic. If not, then OLSR routes will be used. This will let us deploy Babel and examine its performance in our networks without disturbing nodes which are not running Babel.
Important: Be aware that older radios with limited memory – the ones using the tiny firmware images – will not be able to support both protocols and should be eventually replaced.
Evaluating success will depend on a few things, and the more feedback from the community the better. Our goals are to provide a more stable network, better routing decisions, and lower network overhead. Assuming success, the time scale to replace OLSR will be measured in years. Once OLSR is gone, any node not running Babel will disconnect, and we don’t want to leave our users behind so we are giving this as much time as needed for the transition to the newer protocol.
AREDN nightly build 20250217, which includes the Babel protocol, is now available.
The only other thing that's changed in this build compared to the 3.25.2.0 production release is the addition of an icon that shows if a link is running the Babel protocol. It looks like this:
Go forth and test (cautiously)!
New Experimental Radio Modes and SSID
From the AREDN website:
Following on the heels of the inclusion of the Babel routing protocol to the AREDN software is another significant enhancement: nightly build 20250219 adds PtP (Point to Point) and PtMP (Point to MultiPoint) configurations. These protocols can be found in the Radio section of the AREDN UI:
Here's a brief explanation of each of them:Mesh PtMP: This makes a node act like your common access point, where Mesh Station nodes can connect to it, but not to each other, and the Mesh PtMP can only connect to Station nodes.Mesh PtP: Same as above except only a single Station is permitted to connect, specified by a MAC address.Mesh Station: Can connect to a Mesh PtMP or, if it’s the authorized node, a Mesh PtP. It cannot connect to anything else.
The new modes also require a new SSID. This changed SSID is a necessary by-product of how these modes are implemented. Our current Mesh uses the WiFi Ad-Hoc radio mode, while these new modes use the WiFi Infrastructure (sometimes called Manager) radio mode. Infrastructure Stations will connect by matching the appropriate SSID, without regard for any channel setting. Therefore, to make sure Stations connect to their correct end-point, we encode the channel in these new SSIDs. For example, if you have a Mesh PtMP node on channel 175 at 10 MHz, the SSID would be AREDN-175-10-v3.
Consider this feature EXPERIMENTAL. We are releasing it for feedback from the community. We know that Infrastructure radio mode is better supported and we suspect it provides better compatibility between vendors compared to AdHoc mode, and supports higher bandwidths. We’d like to get feedback from the community to see if this is true, if this is useful, and if it’s worth the support costs of including this in future releases.
The use of OSLR in AREDN, and the load it imposes on the network has been a “rich topic of discussion” among network experts in Amateur Radio and advocates of other microwave network architectures. In my opinion, those concerns… while valid… are distinctly secondary to AREDN’s ease of use of within Amateur Radio. Most Amateur Radio Operators aren’t networking experts, so AREDN’s “plug and play” nature has gotten many more Amateur Radio Operators using microwave networking than previous, and other microwave networking systems. Thus, the AREDN developers being able to address the shortcomings of OLSR without abandoning AREDN’s historical ease of use, is definitely a win for Amateur Radio.
Similarly, the (currently experimental) addition of Mesh PtMP, Mesh PtP, and Mesh Station settings makes AREDN even easier to configure and build microwave networks without extensive network knowledge. While it’s always been possible to build AREDN networks with a combination of automatic mesh networking, and static links, such information was often “tribal knowledge” rather than “configure from the menu”, so this addition is a welcome change, in my opinion.
Greater Use of 44Net Addresses in AREDN
The addition of Enabled 44NET LAN configurations in AREDN Production Release 3.25.2.0 is, in my opinion, significant. A brief explanation from a previous mention in a non-production build:
LAN NAT & 44NET modes. You can now use ARDC's 44net subnets as a device’s LAN addresses. We’ve also improved LAN NAT to support larger address ranges.
By default, AREDN uses the 10.0.0.0/8 Private IP address space and Network Address Translation (NAT), which (by design) is not routable outside of an AREDN network.
Thus, in my opinion, there are several “wins” for the use of 44Net addresses in AREDN:
- 44Net IPv4 addresses are assignable to individual Amateur Radio Operators / systems. Thus a “system wide service” for AREDN would be traceable and “knowable” to an individual Amateur Radio Operator or group.
- 44Net IPv4 addresses are (generally) static. They don’t change, or at least, change slowly, thus more “stable” (depending on the application, that’s sometimes preferred behavior).
- 44Net IPv4 addresses are routable on the Internet. For some AREDN applications, that could be a “feature”. An example is making a high resolution camera on a mountaintop AREDN node viewable from the Internet.
- ARDC has mentioned periodically that it is developing a 44Net Virtual Private Network (VPN) service; integrating that service with AREDN (Internet) tunnel servers and clients would (potentially) be a powerful combination.
ZR > BEACON
By Steve Stroh N8GNJ
Short mentions of Zero Retries Interesting items.
Upcoming Events Countdown
- Utah Digital Communications Conference, 2025-02-22 in Sandy, Utah, USA tomorrow.
- HamSCI 2025, 2025-03-14 and 15 in Newark, New Jersey, USA in 4 weeks. Registration for HamSCI 2025 is now open. Tina KD7WSF and I will attend this event. I hope to meet up with any Zero Retries readers that are also attending HamSCI 2025 to talk about all things Zero Retries Interesting.
- Southeastern VHF Conference 2025, 2025-04 and 05 in Clarksville, Tennessee, USA in 6 weeks. More details in an email list message.
- LinuxFest Northwest 2025, 2025-04-25 thru 27 in Bellingham, Washington, USA in 9 weeks. The largest Linux conference in the Pacific Northwest. No direct involvement with Amateur Radio, but I’ll be attending and learning.
- Four Days In May 2025 - 2025-05-15 in Fairborn, Ohio USA (in conjunction with Hamvention 2025) in 13 weeks. The biggest and best QRP (low power operation) event in the world!
- Hamvention 2025 - 2025-05-16 thru 18 in Xenia, Ohio, USA in 13 weeks. I will be attending this event. I hope to meet up with any Zero Retries readers that are also attending Hamvention 2025 to talk about all things Zero Retries Interesting.
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ESPARGOS: ESP32-based Wi-Fi Sensing Array (YouTube)
Louis Mamakos WA3YMH in a Comment on Zero Retries 0189:
Here's some amazing work that this community might be interesting:
ESPARGOS: ESP32-based WiFi sensing array
Develop and deploy WiFi sensing applications effortlessly: ESPARGOS is a phase-coherent ESP32 antenna array.
It's worth the 10 minute time investment watching the video:
