The perspectives of the amateur university networks - AMUNETs

Abstract

Despite its old and famous tradition of more than a century now, it seems that the amateur radio hobby has always had enough place to be additionally advertised within the general population. Especially nowadays - when various commercial communicating services behave as if they are the only possible ways to exchange voice information and computer data at both local and global level - it is for sure that the amateur radio still has its important task to accomplish: to remain an alternative, non-official, non-for-profit and often ad-hoc constructed network of various technical devices and their passionate users. With practicing some modern approaches within the hobby, the computerized amateur radio networks might be also used as AMUNETs - the digital links between university centers, their cathedras and departments, and surrounding schools - particularly in rural areas that are suffering of not much of fixed and cell telephony infrastructure, as well as the Internet connectivity. In order to make better regulatory environment for these new suggested networks, several regulatory improvements have to be made as soon as possible. The paper starts with analyzing the actual legal situation and gives new approaches to remove some bureaucracy obstacles. One of the novelties is a new licensing system proposal: the Amateur Digital License (ADL) - permission for those devoted to digital and computer-related communications.