Rhizomatica at Hamvention 2025
Below is a guest contribution from Peter Bloom, General Coordinator of ARDC grantee Rhizomatica. If you’re a grantee and are interested in submitting a guest contribution, please reach out to giving@ardc.net.
Our organization, Rhizomatica, is a non-profit organization supporting worldwide community communications infrastructure in hard-to-reach areas like the Ecuadorian and Brazilian Amazon, Central African Republic, and Bangladesh. Though based outside of the US, back in May, two of us – myself and HERMES Project Lead Rafael Diniz PU2UIT – traveled to Xenia, OH, to attend Hamvention. The purpose of this trip was to build bridges with the ham community around a Rhizomatica-developed technology called HERMES, an open-source system used by some hams to do digital communications over HF radio. We aimed to raise awareness of our project and allow attendees to learn more about it.
We had a booth inside the vendor area of Hamvention, and hundreds of the over 30 thousand attendees engaged with us around HERMES and our connectivity work. This was quite lucky as originally, we were not able to get an indoor booth in the vendor area and were going to be outside in the Flea Market area under the sun and rain. ARDC was able to move to a larger booth and let us use the smaller one they no longer needed (thanks ARDC!).
Being able to talk with hams, showing them the hardware and software, and explaining what we are doing was an excellent way to get the word out, and also to engage with people who currently use our software (or want to) about what their needs and expectations are. Some of these conversations led to clear implementation ideas that we will take forward, for example a plug-and-play device with a screen to easily do digital on any rig. Our strategy to engage with this community is about getting more people interested and “mainstreaming” the HERMES project beyond just the people we serve in far-flung places around the world.
On the first day of the event, Rhizomatica was featured at the ARDC Grantee Forum, which helped let people know about who we are and led to numerous conversations. Examples included a project officer from the Open Source Ecosystem Enabler at UNDP, numerous ham-related media outlets, and others interested in replacing the closed-source software most hams use to do digital with HERMES.
Many people who had heard of us stopped by the booth, and we had the chance to do deep dives with them on the software we have been developing as part of HERMES and the larger technology and policy ecosystem for digital access and connectivity. Since so much of the ham world is present at Hamvention, we had longer interactions as well with SDR-based HF transceiver companies to explore how to get our software running on their radios. One of these companies was our current hardware/radio supplier, HF Signals, based out of India. We discussed needed changes to their open-source hardware to make it more accessible for the people Rhizomatica serves, such as upgrading their hardware to run digital voice software from FreeDV, another open-source project operating in the space.
Overall, we are very happy to have attended Hamvention, building the bridges we were able to build in the amateur radio community, and meeting all the interesting people we were able to meet.
If you’re interested in following or helping with the project, please visit our websites or find us on GitHub.
