Video version of this episode: https://youtu.be/yg2mGqmBBHI
Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications (a project of the Internet Archive): https://archive.org/details/dlarc
Zero Retries Newsletter: https://www.zeroretries.org
As evidenced by a six month gap in episodes of Store & Forward, the latter half of 2025 was busy for both Kay / DLARC and Steve / Zero Retries.
The big project for Steve and his wife Tina KD7WSF in 2025 was the decision to hold the first Zero Retries Digital Conference (2025) in Everett, Washington on September 13, as well as continuing to publish Zero Retries weekly. ZRDC 2025 Archive – https://www.zeroretries.org/p/zero-retries-digital-conference-2025. There was an amazing amount of preparation work to be done for ZRDC 2025, and we were also volunteers for GNU Radio Conference 2025, held the week before, and in the same venue, as ZRDC 2025.
The big project for Kay and Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications (DLARC) was receiving a second grant to continue acquiring and digitizing and organizing additional material for DLARC. DLARC scanned about 750,000 pages in 2025 of ham newsletters, manuals, and documents, much of it never online before, now searchable. And that number doesn’t include audio, CD-ROMs, video, reel-to-reel, even some movie filmstrips.
Two big highlights of Kay’s work for DLARC in 2025 were:
Locating and publishing Packet Radio Temporary Notes (early packet radio development documents from the 1970s–80s, informally circulated, never formally published). He says many still remain to be found.
Permission from AMSAT (NA / US) to add everything they have published, including newsletters and magazines like AMSAT Journal and Amateur Satellite Report, sourced from paper scans and DVDs. Orbit Magazine, published for only a year or so, was a particular highlight.
One of Steve’s primary highlights of 2025, besides ZRDC 2025, was the emergence of the LinHT (Linux Handheld Transceiver). LinHT is an open source project to develop an open source Software Defined 420-450 MHz transceiver in a portable radio format. The big news about LinHT is that it runs GNU Radio natively, not a stripped down version. The LinHT prototypes are working and have a few modes such as M17 already running, and Revision 2 is already in development. More info at https://m17project.org/linht-hw/.
Another of Steve’s highlights of 2025 was late in the year, 44Net Connect (which Steve had been calling 44Net VPN) competed its beta testing phase. 44Net Connect is now available for any Amateur Radio Operator to request a block of static IPv4 IP addresses with a free Virtual Private Network service. This is particularly useful for Amateur Radio Operators whose Internet service provides IPv4 addresses via “Carrier Grade Network Address Translation”, such as Starlink.
In 2026, Kay looks forward to continuing to acquire and digitize material for DLARC. Steve is looking forward to a (likely) ZRDC 2026, perhaps some involvement in requesting regulatory changes by the FCC to remove symbol rates and bandwidth limits from the VHF / UHF bands, a new book from ARRL titled Digital Networking for Ham Radio, and working with ARDC once again on their new Grants Communications Team.
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