What This Port Is
Port 2875 sits in the registered ports range (1024–49151). These ports are assigned by IANA to specific services upon request — they're not grabbed first-come-first-served like a domain name, but they're also not guarded as strictly as the well-known ports below 1024.
IANA's registry lists port 2875 as:
- Service name:
dxmessagebase2 - Protocol: TCP and UDP
- Description: DX Message Base Transport Protocol
- Registered: January 13, 2009
Port 2874 is its sibling, registered simultaneously as dxmessagebase1. The two were filed as a pair.
What "DX Message Base" Suggests
In amateur radio, DX means long-distance contact — working stations far away, often across continents. A message base is a store-and-forward bulletin board: operators post messages, others retrieve them, the network propagates them onward. Ham radio has a long history of these systems, running over packet radio via AX.25 and later over the Internet.
The registration points toward someone building an Internet transport for a ham radio message store — something to carry messages between nodes in a way that went beyond what existing protocols offered. The -1 and -2 suffix pattern suggests a primary and secondary port, common in protocols that separate control from data.
What Happened
Nothing that anyone documented. There is no RFC. There is no open-source implementation with any visible users. There are no forum threads from 2009 saying "we're deploying dxmessagebase." The registration exists; the protocol, for all practical purposes, does not.
This isn't unusual. The registered ports range contains hundreds of protocols that were registered by people with real intentions, then quietly abandoned when the project stalled, the team moved on, or a simpler solution won out.
Is Anything Actually Running Here?
Probably not — but the only way to know on your own machine is to check:
On Linux or macOS:
On Windows:
If something shows up, it isn't dxmessagebase2. It's whatever application claimed the port for its own use — which is perfectly legal for unregistered traffic on registered ports.
Why This Port Exists in the First Place
The registered ports range exists to prevent collisions. If two different applications both wanted to use port 2875, traffic would go to the wrong place. By filing with IANA, a developer stakes a claim: "when you see port 2875, that's mine."
The problem is that registration requires no proof of deployment. You file the form, IANA records it, and the entry persists indefinitely — whether the protocol ships or not. The registry is a record of intentions as much as implementations.1
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