Written down properly,
and published where you can read it.
Longer technical work from this network, published as complete documents rather than as summaries pointing at a repository. Each one is a single self-contained page. It renders without JavaScript, prints cleanly, and can be saved to disk and read later with nothing else installed.
| count | 2 |
| format | Self-contained HTML, no external requests |
| license | MIT, attribution required |
| author | Mark, K9MEV, AS402766 |
| corrections | markvd@markvd.net, welcomed |
A routed 44Net subnet at home
AMPRNet, the 44.0.0.0/8 space set aside for amateur radio digital experimentation, is one of the few places a licensed operator can get genuinely routed address space to play with. Getting it into a home lab is the part nobody writes down. This guide does.
It walks the whole build: two WireGuard tunnels to separate 44Net Connect points of presence for redundancy, BGP sessions over both, a dedicated routing table so the 44Net path cannot leak into your household traffic, MTU and MSS values that actually work rather than the ones people copy from forums, and a firewall that will not embarrass you. Every BGP filter clause is explained line by line, including the variant that accepts 44Net routes only.
Written from a real deployment on a MikroTik hEX S, with the portal screenshots cleaned up and annotated as figures. Announced to the AMPRNet Connect mailing list, where several operators have since built from it. Placeholders throughout for your own keys, addresses, ASNs, and call sign.
HERMES: text messages that do not need the internet
A system design for passing ARRL radiograms and short text messages when the usual infrastructure is unavailable. The appliance pairs a Raspberry Pi with a QRP Labs QMX transceiver. It uses the internet when there is one and falls back to HF with JS8Call when there is not, with store and forward, intermediate relay stations, and verifiable delivery across both paths.
The paper covers the hardware and antenna choices, the wire protocol and its conformance vectors, the identity and security model, the regulatory reading around automatic control, governance and succession, and the operational shape of a real deployment. It also documents the measurement capability that turned out to be the more useful half of the system: a network of idle nodes beaconing and listening produces a continuous, honest picture of what actually propagates between two places on a given band at a given hour.
Revision 2.2 was written after the software was built, not before. It includes measured throughput replacing the original estimates, the deviations the implementation forced on the design, and the bugs worth recording. That section exists because a whitepaper that has never met an implementation is a wish list.
On publishing this way
Both documents are one file each. No stylesheet to fetch, no font to download, no script, no analytics, and no third-party request of any kind. Save either one to a laptop, a phone, or a USB stick in a go bag and it will still render years from now.
That is not nostalgia. A document about operating when the internet is gone should not require the internet to read, and a build guide is most useful at exactly the moment the network you are building is not working yet.