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Nov 20, 2021Liked by Steve Stroh N8GNJ

Steve,

Thanks for the insightful article!

Regarding the diversity of packet radio.. there are quite a few different reasons that it is diverse. First look at why it was NOT diverse in the 90s. In the 90s, hams (and everybody else) knew they wanted always-up network access, and for a while packet radio provided that better than the Internet did, for DxClusters, ham-radio-mail and news, and hobby station-to-station digital communications. Packet hardware sold like like crazy. Implementations based on TAPR designs sole great and there wasn't a huge drive to make completely new non-TAPR-standard products. 56K/9600/repeaters, were not strictly necessary to do the things the majority of hams were looking for. Once the Internet became accessible to most of us, packet radio went into the junk drawer. At that point, packet radio was history. APRS was possibly the only survivor and APRS has pretty much become an accessory of the Internet, its ham-radio-alone functionality mostly ignored.

So now you have a rather rare hobby. Most non-APRS packet radio equipment at a large hamfest is old and sold cheap. APRS is still surviving on Internet life support. WInLink is partly blooming because the user interface for it is so easy to master. But its application is also mostly tied to the Internet.

There is new interest in ham-radio packet, I think, because so many VHF/UHF operations are becoming dependent on the Internet. It's really hard to get intra-state communications without Internet. Packet radio can deliver that, without the Internet.

KPC-3 TNCs outshine the new competitive hardware TNCs because it has been around longer. TNC-PI, 8 or 9 years old, was doing a pretty good job of holding its own, even though it was NOT a working-out-of-the-box, until the manufacturer closed up shop. NInoTNC is barely 2 years old and isn't driven by a company that can afford good advertising. It's also not programmed to generate profit. Plus it is not a ready-out-of-the-box appliance operator product.

Not tailoring the product to works-out-of-the-box appliance operators is pretty much what keeps DRAWS, VARAMODEM+Winlink, and Direwolf from taking over the market as well. Any good consumer product that requires a know-how of computer configuration, is at a disadvantage. Firmware based hardware products can be made to just work, at the expense of versatility.

There are some top notch, ready-out-of-the-box products for APRS, including from Yeasu and Kenwood (at least). WinLink applications may already have some ready-out-of-the-box products -- I'm not tuned in to that space -- or they will soon I expect.

The bottom line is, I think, the reason there are small-regional tribes is that a LOCAL support group is required for pretty much every non-HF packet product out there, except APRS.

TARPN is putting out some great documentation, and they have a pretty good idea of how to make intra-state networks run smoothly, but the TARPN plan is nearly useless unless the density of operators is high enough. Just to start it we need 5 or more hams who want to get together on the project in a local area. It's certainly easier to do with more people, than less, and TARPN requires some assembly, it's not working-out-of-the-box. What ham products have ever sold well that needed more than a couple hams to make it work?

While hams could trivially go back to hacking on packet the way it was in the late 1980s, that isn't really a practical value-adder for most hams, like it was before Internet became easy, and outside of big-group-network projects, packet radio doesn't create the population density required to make it really fun.

So? Check out the big-group-network projects. Many of those hams are having fun with packet. Your mileage may vary?

Tadd - KA2DEW

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Nov 20, 2021Liked by Steve Stroh N8GNJ

I think this "tribalism" is occurring because the Internet makes widely distributed speech so cheap and easy. Before the Internet, it took considerable resources, in terms of money, time or both to communicate with a mass audience. With the Internet in its current form, anyone can set up a website, blog, email list or whatever for little to no money (at least at first) and in an evening or less. So everyone with a bright idea (and I'll stipulate that a lot of them are quite bright) to create some new facet of ham radio can jump in and get it going. Because we're conditioned to search for "packet radio north carolina", we find Tadd and his good works. Groups like the old TAPR are on page 3 of the search results and we never see them. So we get a Tait, a ninoTNC and hook into TARPN.

Well, not me, not yet. I'm still a bit far to the west. But it's coming my way, slowly but surely. :-)

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"25 kbps is the fastest data communications over VHF / UHF that we can do at the moment", can't agree with that. I've already read about NPR right here. AREDN and other 2.4GHz stuff is out there, the Icom ID-1 although no longer with us did 128 kbps. I also find that people struggle to get set up with the right hardware to get those speeds.

Claude Shannon told us that we need wider bandwidth than you get with baseband audio to get higher speeds. The universe does not permit otherwise.

Yes, in the eighties, there was a saying I remember well. "He who writes the code owns the node", and the TNC/TNC II was born.

73,

Chris VE3NRT

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