ke6i.ampr.org -- what is this?


Maybe you're thinking -- what is this ke6i.ampr.org thing? Why have another website at ke6i.ampr.org. What is ampr.org anyway? Well, I'm not the definitive expert on this. Really I'm just saying what I know, far as it goes.

Long ago, early in the internet, ham radio operators managed to get assigned to them a class-A block of IP addresses and the domain ampr.org. ampr.org isn't that special -- but the Class-A IP addresses consist of about 1/256 of all availble ip addresses for the entire internet. We have anything that begins with 44.0.0.0/8

Basically ampr.org is a network of gateways on the internet, which use the 44.xx.xx.xx addresses and connect radio ports or other ham radio related services to each other via either the internet or radio connections. Mostly systems are linked via internet, there's no ham radio-based RF backbone. But there are some small networks of ham radio machines that do connect via radios.

These ip addresses and the domain ampr.org are generally available to ham radio operators, if you jump through a few hoops, basically. Me I got ke6i.ampr.org ahd vhf.ke6i.ampr.org assigned back when I was running jnos -- and they had been sitting dormant since the gateway went down at w6yx. I've gone through the process of becoming a gateway for these ip's to the ampr.org network. The ke6i.ampr.org packets are tunneled to my PC here via servers generously donated for this purpose by people with big bandwidth.

For the most part, the ampr.org ip's work just like any other ip. There's no technical advantage to this. The main difference is that I can identify other hams that come in here by their 44.xx.xx.xx ip's and sometimes this is used as a simple filter to check ham radio traffic. I can connect to other ampr.org machines using my ampr.org ip address, so they know I'm cool. Hehe. That's most of it.

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