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Before Hamvention, I wrote a grant application to ARDC for about $50K for operating our hamfest booth to show innovative Amateur Radio technology such as FreeDV and M17, expanding to more shows, and was hoping for more Open Source amateur radio projects to present. I had been funding this essentially out-of-pocket for years and was out of personal funds to do that any longer.

ARDC did not approve the grant, and suggested that I apply to one of their already sponsored projects to show in _their_ booth. At that point, FreeDV and M17 were sponsored by ARDC, so I transferred the Hamvention booth to FreeDV, and they allowed M17 to exhibit, and the result was essentially the same as if HamOpen was operating the booth. I plan to transfer the Hamcation booth to FreeDV as well, and at that point HamOpen.org will be out of the trade show booth business for now. We will be able to get booths when that changes. I wish we could operate it just on membership funds, but that’s not a reality at this time.

M17 is about to apply to ARDC for 2025-2026 funds and there is some question that they’ll get them. I feel that M17 is a critical project for Amateur Radio, and am helping with their paperwork, etc. I’ll report on what happens.

On the Open Source front, the Post Open effort has made a lot of progress. There is a prototype zero-cost license and paid license, and a rudimentary web site at https://postopen.org/ . We have a pro-bono law firm that will put legal solidity on the licenses that I wrote. I made an application to ARDC for about $200K to run this effort which they rejected as out-of-scope, although they made a grant to Software Freedom Conservancy in the same grant cycle. I will start collecting individual donations for the Post Open effort, although grants must provide most of its funding until it is ready to operate paid licensing – at which point it must operate outside of our non-profit. It will probably be a 501(c)6, which is the IRS structure for industry organizations that are not-for-profit but not charitable non-profits.

Of late, I have been talking with other granting organizations than ARDC. ARDC is the big fish in our little pond, with Yasme Foundation being one of the only other grantors specializing in Amateur Radio in general, and ARRL Foundation being specialized in just funding ARRL. ARDC works from a fund of about USD$137M, which they are attempting to preserve through investment income while granting the amount that IRS requires each year – which is potentially enough to eventually deplete their fund if they aren’t careful or lucky. They have enough grant applications per cycle now that they are rejecting many of them, and they have increasing expenses due to building a relatively large staff. But although ARDC is the big fish in our pond, among granting organizations ARDC is at most a medium-sized fish.

So, I started talking with the really big fish, and was surprised at how warm a reception I got. STEM and Open Source are important to many of them – Open Source is important to all of the ones that invest in scientific research now, as it’s become the software infrastructure of science, and they find themselves making grants to simply preserve the software of some finished research project. They see our Post Open project as a better way to deal with that. Soliciting from such grantors for Amateur Radio is also possible as long as there is a STEM connection.

I am about to start soliciting for individual donations for Post Open (not from the Amateur community, from the Open Source one) and there is a 3 or 4 month cycle to see if we’ll get grants from some of the new organizations I’m dealing with.

Hi, I’m Bruce Perens K6BP. It’s Hamvention 2023, and HamOpen.org continues to sponsor worthy Open Source Amateur Radio projects to exhibit in our booth. We have the M17 Project and FreeDV with us.

I am very pleased to host these two groups, as they grew out of the Codec2 project to develop an Open Source digital voice codec for Amateur Radio, which I evangelized because I was concerned that hams were using the proprietary AMBE codec. But I didn’t have the chops to write a new CODEC, much as I wanted one. Jean-Marc Valin (Speex author) introduced David Rowe VK5DGR, an Australian ham with a Ph.D. in digital voice coding. David had a codec from his 20-year-old Ph.D. thesis sitting on the shelf, and took on the project. He has made incredible progress since.

I wish I had as much progress to show for my $14 Remote Rig Controller. My latest work on this has been to hack the ESP32 Flashing Software to support configuring the device’s WiFi from the console. Unfortunately I had a heart attack and double bypass surgery in November, a flood of my hamshack and workshop this winter, and have had to concentrate on my main business, and thus I am delayed on this project. Fortunately I am entirely recovered from the heart attack (actually I have never been able to exercise as easily as I can now) and am making progress in reassembling the hamshack.

At the show, I have been speaking with ARDC about funding some future projects. ARDC has money to grant because they held IP version 4 addresses for Amateur Radio, and sold 1/4 of that IP block to Amazon for about $134 Million. Fortunately, ARDC has lots of IP version 4 addresses left for hams, and so many IPV6 addresses that we could give one to every person in the world. They are good folks and have supported many important projects.

By now, Amateur Radio organizations and others know about ARDC and their grant program. I’m going to discuss an IRS rule that will be a problem you must navigate if you are a 501(c)3 in the US and receive a large grant from ARDC.

ARDC states here that US-based entities that wish to receive grants must be a “501(c)(3) Public Charity, government agency, school, or university.” For the purpose of this article I will assume that you are in the US and aren’t a government entity or a school. Thus, according to that page, you must be a 501(c)3 or have one as a financial sponsor to receive an ARDC grant.

I have previously been told by ARDC that they will give grants to entities that are not a 501(c)3, but that the accounting requirements are much worse and require your annual financial statements and detailed data about how the money was spent. That’s not an official statement, and I don’t speak for them, so if you need this you should contact them directly.

To continue to be a 501(c)3, a charity must pass the Public Support Test. This test requires that 1/3 of your charity’s income must come from donors who each contribute less than 1/50 of your charity’s income.

So, let’s say that your charity receives a $100,000 grant from ARDC in a tax year, and no other large grants. To pass the Public Support Test, you must also raise $50,000 from donors who each donate $3000 or less. You could achieve this with 17 donations, but it is more likely that you would have hundreds or thousands of donors who each donated a small amount.

The way I have planned to do this for HamOpen.org (which is still in the 501(c)3 process and hasn’t asked ARDC for anything yet) is to ask ARDC to double-match donations. In other words, for each $1 of small private donations, ARDC would give $2. Double-matching is a pretty strong motivator for people to donate: every $1 they put in becomes $3. So, I’d probably be able to collect donations sufficient to pass the Public Support Test and get the full amount of the grant from ARDC.

We first learned about this because Open Research Institute got a big grant from ARDC. I suspect it’s so large that they don’t have a hope of collecting small donations sufficient to pass the Public Support Test – and the tax year in which they had to do this may already have passed. This not their fault – the public support test requirement came as a surprise to them, and me too – but the IRS might convert them to a private foundation instead of a 501(c)3, and they might lose the ability for donors like you and me to write their donations off of their taxes.

ARDC is a non-profit and doesn’t need this write-off. It’s smaller donors like you and me who do.

When your organization fails the Public Support Test, it’s called “tipping” in tax jargon, because it causes your 501(c)3 to “tip” over to being a private foundation. This is not the end of the world for an organization, but it’s sub-optimal for collecting donations from individuals and businesses.

One problem here is that ARDC doesn’t want to give their prospective grantees tax guidance, because, no doubt, their lawyers have told them not to – for their own legal protection. So they don’t explain the situation I just have. I am not a tax attorney, or a tax accountant, and you should consult those folks.