With Roland going for his license next week and our first HAM Club meeting next week, I wanted to post another project that is moving up our Radar.
As part of our company continuing education we’re moving to learn BGP in May with Rick Frey Consulting on Mikrotiks, which is the standard routers we use at work for all of our customers. A Few weeks ago I was speaking with a colleague who mentioned he requested a /24 from AMPRnet many moons ago and was successfully using Mikrotiks as a plug and play service for HAMs. In that you request/purchase a pre-configured router from him and it provides you 5 Public IPs over a VPN connection to his cloud router which was peering the /24 from AMPRNet. The reason for this ostensibly was to circumvent rural and cellular based ISPs that were performing CGNAT, double NAT, Triple NAT, and even just straight up port blocking on the networks. Things all required to get systems like EchoStar and Dstar online. Even VoIP in some areas can benefit from this. As part of our project and this Radar.
Our goal is to build a front end “store” on KI5PCQ.com that allows HAMs to request a Public IP or a block of Public IPS, pay for it (unfortunately this still incurs a cost to us even though AMPRnet provides the IPs, for example the Cloud router will still cost approximately 240$/Year to operate, not to mention the maintenance on the automation and eventual admin overhead of ensuring IPs are being used appropriately.) and/or order a mikrotik direct from one of our distributors (For as low as 25$ plus shipping in many cases). The educational aspect of this will be learning how to integrate ZOHO’s payment portal and Sales API with Mikrotik’s API and even integrating it with the FCC Database. The end goal being a completely automated system that allows a Licensed Radio operator to request an IP, pay expected fees (Approximately 1-2$/Mo/IP), order a router if needed, and if not how to configure existing Routers (We intend to have multiple Docs on how to configure the most Common Mikrotik’s for plug and play use), and receive credentials all within a matter of minutes. Allowing more clubs and more operators to get on AMPRnet and start using it and utilizing it’s benefits with very low costs to operators.
That being said, the first step is get to registered on the AMPRNet portal!
Talk to y’all soon!