ARDC is thrilled to publicly announce the launch of the 44Net Portal 2.0, now live at https://portal.ampr.org/. This update brings a host of new features and improvements aimed to enhance the overall user experience, including:

• an improved, modern user interface (UI),
• a modern, secure framework,
• capability to facilitate of a pool of administrators,
• DNS management, and
• a new ticketing system to improve support response time.

For more information about these features, check out the Portal 2.0 documentation, which also covers how to get started with requesting 44Net address space.

We officially set the new Portal loose about a month ago, on April 3rd, letting the 44Net community know on both the mailing list and ardc.groups.io/g/44net. To our delight and astonishment, we had over 1000 tickets created in the first 36 hours, and over half of the account from the previous version (~2000 accounts) had sign-ins within 48 hours. We are so pleased to see so much engagement, and our hope is that the improved UI helps to make it easier for new folks to connect to and use this rare and important resource.

As it goes with any launch, though we had done extensive testing on the new Portal, we of course uncovered some new bugs post release. We’re happy to say that the vast majority of these were dealt with within the first few days. Should you sign up for the new portal and come across a bug, please reach out to our support team at newportal@ardc.net. Please provide a summary of expected behavior, actual behavior, time of incident, and browser information.

This project has been a long time in the making, and we’re so glad it’s finally here! Many thanks in particular to Chris Smith (G1FEF) on development, Tim Požar (KC6GNJ) for project management, Rebecca Key (KO4KVG) on documentation and communication, Merideth Stroh (KK7BKI) on testing and support, Zachary Seguin (VA3ZTS) for extensive testing and UI feedback, and Ian Redden (VA3IAN) for invaluable insights, particularly with regards to further development.

Here’s to the new Portal, and to its continued improvement and evolution, all in service of getting more people connected via 44Net.

About 44Net

44Net is a network resource that helps amateur radio operators, learners, and makers democratize technology and enable learning for IP networks, electronics, and RF use cases. It’s free of charge to amateur radio operators for non-commercial use. If you’re interested in acquiring address space, we encourage you to visit the new Portal and set up an account!

Have questions and/or would like to learn more about 44Net? Visit our ardc.net/44net for a directory of resources. You can also contact us at any time via email (contact@ardc.net), and we encourage you to join ardc.groups.io for access to the 44Net-related subgroups (44Net and 44Net VPN).