Phil Karn

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Phil Karn is a native of Baltimore, Maryland. He earned a BSEE degree from Cornell University in 1978 and a MSEE from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979. From 1979 until 1984, Phil Karn worked at Bell Laboratories in Naperville, Illinois, and Murray Hill, New Jersey. From 1984 until 1991, he was with Bell Communications Research in Morristown, New Jersey. Since 1991 he has been with Qualcomm in San Diego, where he specializes in wireless data networking protocols, security and cryptography.

He has been an active contributor in the IETF, especially in security, but is also a strong contributor to the Internet architecture. His name is on at least 6 RFCs. He is the inventor of Karn's algorithm; a method for calculating the round trip time for IP packet retransmission.

He is well known in the amateur radio community for his work on the KA9Q Network Operating System (NOS, named after his amateur callsign), early 9600 bit/s FSK radio modems, and more recently, the introduction of forward error correction (FEC) into the Amateur Satellite Service, with FEC applied to the 400 bit/s PSK telemetry from the now defunct AO-40 satellite.