Friday, July 27, 2012

IPv6 & Ham Radio

Back in 1998, Naoto Shimazaki, 7L4FEP described an idea for use of IPv6 over the amateur radio in a document he presented to a TAPR Digital Communication Conference.

"IPv6 has huge address space and it supports real-time traffic. IPv6 realize new applications. For example, managing IPv4 address is not easy. It is possible to encode our "call sign" into IPv6 address. It enables us to managing IP address much easier."


You can read the whole thing here.

A few members from the Mesa Amateur Radio Club of Arizona took this to code.

"Club Members Jacques N1ZZH and Vinnie N1LQJ have developed a method of embedding a 2x5 (7 Character) callsign plus up to 185 nodes, plus 1 universal bit and three reserved bits in the 2nd octet, and a 16 bit amateur radio identifer at bit 24 of an IPv6 /64 Subnet address."


They announced;

"Tools for encoding and decoding amateur radio callsigns, up to 2x4 & 185 nodes, from IPv6 /64 subnets with Universal bit support and Amateur Radio Flag at the 24bit. Experimental RFC to IETF is being submitted for this proposed amateur standard."

http://sourceforge.net/projects/hamv6/

Other:

IPv6 For Amateur Radio - EA4GPZ/M0HXM

https://github.com/darconeous/ham-addr


 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was hoping we'd be able to get an allocation for the whole of Amateur Radio in the same vein as 44.0.0.0/8. I contacted IANA in February 2011 and received this response:

Currently, the only policy we have been given for the allocation of global unicast IPv6 address space is
for allocation to the RIRs. We do not have a policy allowing allocation to organisations like AMPRNet.
For this reason, we would strongly suggest contacting an RIR for an IPv6 allocation.

Perhaps someone with some more influence could contact them and make our case. Our other options include:

- Get an AMPRnet allocation in each of the RIR regions. This has the disadvantage of fragmenting the routing table (one of the things IPv6 was designed to mitigate). There's also no guarantee all of the RIRs would grant such a request.

- Use ULA space. This has the disadvantage of rendering the IPv6 AMPRnet non-globally routeable. Then again, not much of the IPv4 AMPRnet is truly globally routed, with the gateway for the greater Internet being a single machine somewhere at UCSD.

Would love to noodle this around with more of the ham community.

73 de Kevin, N8VNR

Unknown said...

Hi Kevin,

I just looked at this, I'm wondering if it would make sense for the amateur radio community to draft a RFC specifying part of the unallocated range be given to amateur (similar to the 44/8 block), with routing and aggregation based on global grid squares.

The other option would be IPv4 compatible IPv6 licenses (every ipv4 allocation maps to a IPv6 address subnet, so each ham could use their IPv4 44/8 address to run a IPv6 network.

73 de Bill, KD7NLF