QRV Monthly

Inside ARDC: Grants, 44Net and the Future of Ham Radio

How Amateur Radio Digital Communications quietly funds the hobby’s next generation.

by Todd KE9DQS

Chances are, if you’ve held a license for any real stretch of time, you’ve already gotten something out of Amateur Radio Digital Communications without realizing it. It might be the repeater your club leans on. It might be a scholarship that helped a student in your area. It might be some piece of network infrastructure sitting underneath a digital mode you use without a second thought. ARDC has a habit of showing up in places hams don’t expect, and most of us never stop to ask who’s behind it.

To find out, I spoke with two people who represent very different halves of the organization. Chelsea Párraga oversees ARDC’s grant making. John Burwell manages 44Net, the foundation’s long-running program that hands hams a block of genuine, publicly routable IP addresses. One role is about distributing funding. The other is about distributing internet access. But talking to both of them, it became clear they’re circling the same underlying question — who gets a real foothold in this hobby, and what keeps that from happening more often.

Two people, two very different on-ramps

Chelsea grew up surrounded by amateur radio without necessarily choosing it. She’s the third generation in her family to hold a license, and before our conversation she checked in with a relative just to be sure she had the details right. Her grandmother was the one with the big antenna in the yard, working stations across oceans and collecting cards from every contact — and, notably, was also the first on her block to own a personal computer, which she taught herself to use well enough to build small projects of her own. Everyone else in Chelsea’s family leaned technical: her father, several aunts and uncles, her sister, and eventually her husband are all engineers of one kind or another. She went the other direction — history, reading, writing — and didn’t actually sit for her license exam until after she’d already started working at ARDC. Her route in ran through years in nonprofit and philanthropic work rather than through electronics, and it was seeing where that experience overlapped with a community she already cared about that pulled her in.

John’s story starts almost nowhere near a radio at all. He grew up in a small farming town in Texas during the 1980s, came up through scouting, and had just enough brush with amateur radio through badge requirements to know the hobby existed — though CB was far more visible in his town at the time, and licensed operators were scarce. What actually captured him was electronics more broadly: pulling apart anything he could get his hands on, working through beginner electronics guides, and generally being the kid whose family stopped buying him things they didn’t want disassembled by nightfall. That habit steered him toward computers, then into networking professionally — running fiber between school buildings, managing a district’s early internet connection, and eventually building a career around software and small-business networking. Along the way he kept running into 44Net and not fully understanding what it was. It wasn’t until the pandemic, when licensing exams moved online, that he finally got his ticket — and the very first thing he did afterward was request a 44Net subnet of his own.

Two completely different starting points, landing in the same place. That contrast turns out to be a useful lens for how ARDC thinks about who this hobby is actually for.

What separates a funded project from a rejected one?

ARDC’s grant program isn’t built around handing out equipment upgrades. According to Chelsea, the underlying goal is broader participation — more people actually engaging, building, and learning within the hobby — and after several years of reviewing applications, a handful of factors keep showing up in the proposals that succeed.

Team composition tops the list. Applications built around a single person trying to handle curriculum, technical troubleshooting, and community outreach all at once tend to worry ARDC’s reviewers, simply because that workload rarely holds up under pressure. Proposals from clubs with several contributors — someone strong with youth engagement, someone technically capable, someone connected locally — read as more resilient, and ARDC is more comfortable backing them at a higher level.

Engagement matters just as much as competence. Chelsea pointed out that programs aimed at younger participants sometimes default to lecture-style teaching that doesn’t hold anyone’s attention, and that some grantees have learned the hard way that licensing material assumes a level of math a lot of younger students haven’t reached yet. Projects that build in hands-on, age-appropriate activity tend to actually stick.

And then there’s outreach — not a sophisticated marketing plan, just a concrete answer to “how will people find out this exists?” Posting flyers, speaking to a local civic group, partnering with a homeschool network, mentioning it in a newsletter. Chelsea was direct about this: a well-designed program that nobody hears about doesn’t accomplish anything, and applications that spell out exactly how they’ll reach people signal to reviewers that the final, easiest-to-skip step won’t get skipped.

One grantee she singled out as a strong example is Teachers in Space, which trains educators to run high-altitude balloon launches, coordinate with orbiting CubeSats, and build Arduino-based projects with their classes — designed from the start to map onto existing curriculum standards so a teacher can keep running it year after year rather than as a one-off.

What 44Net actually gives someone

Where Chelsea’s world is about people, John’s is about infrastructure — though he’d say it comes down to the same underlying goal. 44Net’s core offering is a set of real, publicly routable IP addresses: not the network-address-translated, restricted access most people get through a home or cellular connection, but a direct line onto the internet the way it worked before providers began locking most of it down behind layers of translation and filtering.

For someone curious about networking, that access means the ability to actually experiment — routing, firewall configuration, BGP — the kind of hands-on exploration that would otherwise require paying a commercial provider for a level of access most wouldn’t sell to an individual anyway. John was candid that this program doesn’t necessarily reach the same young, K-12 audience Chelsea’s grants often target. Its audience is more often the technically inclined adult — someone who works in software or IT and has never had a reason to get licensed, let alone experiment with a repeater or a Linux-based radio controller. 44Net gives that person an entry point.

The example that stuck with him wasn’t a large infrastructure buildout — it was something a fellow ham told him about in passing. The man has a tradition of taking his father flying for his birthday, and on one of those flights, from the passenger seat, he opened a connection back to his home network over his own 44Net address and pulled up the live telemetry from his own ADS-B receiver — listening for his father’s plane, mid-flight, from inside the plane itself. It’s a small, almost silly example, but John pointed to it as exactly the kind of thing this resource makes possible: nobody asked for it, nobody planned it as a use case, it just became available to someone once the access existed.

Advice for someone who’s never applied before

Not everyone reading this runs a club or sits on a board — some are brand new, some are still working toward a license. So I asked Chelsea plainly: what should someone intimidated by the idea of approaching a real foundation actually know before they try?

Her answer was reassuring. ARDC regularly funds first-time applicants and small clubs, frequently for modest amounts — a couple thousand dollars toward equipment or a repair that lets a club do something it currently can’t. Roughly 30% of applications get funded, and a meaningful share of the rejections come from people who misunderstand what ARDC supports in the first place — podcasters or broadcasters assuming this is general radio funding rather than amateur-radio-specific. But for a genuine fit, her small team (mostly her and a colleague) will walk an applicant through the process personally, offer real feedback on unsuccessful attempts, and tell someone honestly if there’s no realistic path forward rather than stringing them along. Every funding decision runs through a volunteer-staffed Grants Advisory Committee and board rather than ARDC employees — a structure Chelsea considers one of the more distinctive things about how the organization operates.

Her advice for students carried a slightly different note: since you won’t be a student forever, eventually you’ll need a sponsoring adult — faculty, staff, a mentor — to help with things like roof access for an antenna. But she was clear that plenty of funded projects originated with a student’s own application, especially at the university level, and that schools consistently tell ARDC they need students to be the ones pushing these ideas forward, not just participating once someone else sets them up.

John’s advice for the technically curious was more blunt: don’t overthink it. Request a subnet. Set up an AllStar node. Try running an EchoLink station. If a project fizzles, hand the resource back or repurpose it — there’s no wrong way to begin, as long as the use stays legal, non-commercial, and representative of the hobby, since 44Net runs on the actual public internet rather than some separate, closed environment.

Looking five years out

I closed by asking both of them what’s likely to matter most for bringing new and different people into the hobby over the next five years.

John pointed to visibility and reduced friction — making it easier for people to show off what they build, clearing away the repetitive obstacles that cause newcomers to quit early, and actively engaging people who aren’t already hams rather than just serving the community that already exists.

Chelsea’s focus was local: small, genuinely welcoming clubs are what will actually grow the hobby, and ARDC’s role is largely to make sure those clubs have the resources to run the programs they’re already dreaming up.

Neither answer had much to do with grant totals or IP allocations. Both came back to the same idea: someone getting taken seriously before they’d proven anything yet.

ARDC also shows up in person more than people might expect. Chelsea will be at the Open Education Conference in Massachusetts at the end of October. John is headed to a hacker conference in New York this month to speak about the community side of running a large distributed network over multiple decades. And the broader ARDC team plans to be at Ham Radio Ham Fair in Tokyo toward the end of August. Whether you’re brand new, an experienced operator looking into infrastructure support, or part of a small club that’s never asked anyone for help before, ARDC is worth a look.

Honoring Navajo Code Talkers

Where wartime radio meets amateur radio.

Every August 14th, the country marks Navajo Code Talkers Day — a tribute to the Navajo Marines who developed and operated one of the most effective, and never-broken, codes in military history. For anyone who’s ever sat behind a microphone or keyed a radio, it’s more than a historical footnote — it’s a direct thread back to our own hobby.

The Code That Was Never Broken

During World War II, the U.S. Marine Corps recruited Navajo men to develop a code based on their own language — an unwritten language of extraordinary complexity that no outside cryptographer, Japanese or American, ever managed to crack. The idea came from Philip Johnston, a World War I veteran who had grown up on the Navajo reservation as the son of a missionary, and who knew that Native American languages (Choctaw, notably) had already proven useful for secure communication in the first World War.

Once trained, Navajo Code Talkers were attached to every Marine division in the Pacific, transmitting messages by radio and telephone at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, and Iwo Jima. They weren’t cryptographers working behind a desk — they were operators, in the field, running radios under fire, translating orders in real time into a code the enemy couldn’t touch.

That’s the connection worth sitting with: at its core, the Code Talkers’ story is a radio operator’s story. Before it was a legendary cipher, it was a communications discipline — clear, fast, accurate transmission under pressure, over the air.

Where Amateur Radio Picks Up the Thread

That thread runs directly into today’s ham radio community. Herb Goodluck, N7HG, a member of the Navajo Nation and the son of Code Talker John V. Goodluck, has spent years keeping that memory active on the airwaves themselves — not just in books and museums. Each August, hams gather under the special event callsign N7C, operating from Window Rock, Arizona, home of the Navajo Tribal Park and Veterans Memorial, working CW, phone, and FT8 across the HF bands to mark the occasion and let operators around the world make contact with the legacy directly.

It’s a fitting way to honor the Code Talkers — because the tools have simply evolved. The discipline of secure, reliable, human-operated radio communication that they mastered under combat conditions is the same discipline any of us practice net control, working DX, or troubleshooting a marginal signal path. The through-line from a 1940s battlefield radio to a 2026 HF rig isn’t a stretch; it’s the same skill, carried forward by different hands.

Why This Story has a Stake in Ham Radio

Amateur radio, as a hobby, still skews narrower than the country it serves. The Navajo Code Talkers’ story is a reminder that some of the most consequential radio work in American history was done by people who rarely get centered in the popular image of “who a radio operator is.” Lifting that story up matters — not as a footnote to be checked off once a year, but as part of the actual history of radio operation in this country. The skills the Code Talkers mastered under fire — clear procedure, discipline, trust in the person on the other end — are the same skills every ham practices on a net, in a contest, or chasing a weak signal through the noise.

How Does Your Signal Get There?

A quick guide to wave propagation.

Ever wonder why your 2-meter handheld only reaches a repeater a few miles away, while a few watts on 20 meters can work the other side of the planet? The answer is propagation — the path a radio wave takes from your antenna to someone else’s. Here are the five basic modes every operator should know.

Why it matters: Understanding which propagation mode you’re relying on helps explain your radio’s real-world performance — and can guide band and antenna choices for your next contact, whether that’s a local net check-in or a DX chase. 73, and see you on the net!

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