Hacker News

> This is important (to me) because the proprietary windows software "VARA" has a de facto death grip on basic emergency amateur radio digital communication.

This fact keeps me out of many ARES exercises. I avoid buying or using proprietary solutions on amateur bands.

^ This!

VARA’s developer released a new version 4.9.1 which had a logic bomb that completely breaks compatibility with all prior versions starting on 1 Jan 2027. Coincidentally this was released shortly after Xara (an open source AI-assisted reimplementation of VARA that was fully compatible with VARA over the air) was published. It was the work of a few minutes with an LLM to extract the new tables and constants from the new binary, so he failed to prevent interoperability with open source implementations but succeeded in doing significant damage to interoperability in the community as hams don’t always update components like this in a timely fashion. Poor judgement at best and bad faith at worst.

It’s definitely time for the amateur radio and emcomm communities to move on.

I have a fork of the now-pulled Xara repo. As of this writing it hasn’t been taken down yet but several other forks were so time will tell: https://github.com/anelson/xara

Mercury is promising. There’s also Data2G and I and others are working on our own modem projects as well. It’s an exciting time to be working with digital modes on amateur radio.

I was only briefly a ham decades ago, so I could be remembering wrong. but isn't it a thing to relay even non emergency messages for a third party as long as it's not commercial? I remember getting a postcard where the message content was from a ham I had talked to, but the postcard itself was sent by someone closer that he relayed the message to. I though it was a common novelty/courtesy thing from back when long distance phone calling was a bigger deal.

You can forward messages as a ham operator, even to the extent of connecting long-distance telephone calls, as long as nobody including you is getting paid for it.

This has led to some subtle questions -- is it OK to use a packet-radio gateway to order a pizza over the Internet? -- but the volunteer/public-service nature of the act is the intent behind the regulations.