Re: [44net] An anniversary of a sort - 36 years

Hi there, I wouldn’t sell anything at any price... at least not yet. Nobody has clear in the networking scene what should be happening next with the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition and who should be doing this transition (carriers, telcos and/or end-users). Not having clear if both IP schemes will coexist for a while, or forever, makes me think we shouldn’t get rid of any resource that we can use, and can trade with, if necessary, later on. The person that officially (or not officially) managed to get the 44/8 in the early Internet times did a quite impressive job, not by filling forms in order to get the address space assigned to ham radio colective but thinking beyond the box (not only out of it), doing prospective, venturing a bunch of possible futures to see where we, the hams, would be using that new thing named "the IPv4 address space" for something quite new related to, let’s say to resume basics on AX.25, and other future related uses, and managed to get a today's expensive resource for free, so so. If you’re yet thinking what we should be doing now in terms of IPv6, OK, no offense but I think you didn't understand the situation where we currently are. What we should be doing next is that mental exercise that guy did years ago again of thinking beyond the box, doing prospective and venturing what and where we want to be in the coming future. By the way, a future we are not going to live to see in most cases. I think about this every day, specially when I do play with my daughter and with the radios I have, with love, at home, and every move I do I'm always considering that we should do again this movement the sooner the better in order to bring back again some glory and respect to our community. The endeavor we are facing isn't an easy task, we all know that, and, just in case anyone doubts it yet, we lack resources we had in the past. The number of hams decrease little by little and we are not handling correctly the generational changeover, as it is evident. It’s not an easy task neither because (not mostly old) today's purists see ham radio as only watts, HF and contesting. Again, no offense, I'm just stating a fact. We lack resources because every year we are less than the year before; our hobby is not of interest for youngsters if we keep on focussing in our likes and not the theirs. Beside that fact, we are not managing to get the old ham radio glories to teach everything they learnt during their entire lives to youngsters that can continue in our hobby what those glories started from where they almost left it. No offense colleagues, but, Are we doing anything the right way today? Is that the surfeit that we cannot do anything better than thinking short-term, again, thinking in our own benefit? I try to foresee that youngsters’ future and don’t see HF but Microwaves and, why not, other non-Ionosferic based communications. This for us might seem like a Sci-Fi movie but for them might be an accurate and realistic version of their today. We should be doing this effort to plan for them, to get resources for them, to manage to get the necessary steps in our community to get to where they should be in the future….but today. What does is means in short? Don’t waste time thinking in short-term and let’s play big and let’s think long-term. What Research and Development are we aimed to do to become our community great again? That question is what IARU, ARRL, AMPR, AMSAT and the like should be working on today. If we cannot manage to get a proper answer in short we are heading to dissapear in the next generation, where IPv4, IPv6 and the ham radio spectre become something useless without ham operators. My 2 cents. Best regards, -- Vy73 de EA1HET, Jonathan