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Glenn R Allison's avatar

I really enjoy see all Packet Radio activities going on again! Great stuff let’s keep it going.

Glenn/N3MEL/TPRFN

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Ben Kuhn's avatar

Hi Steve,

I had a few thoughts for your "How to Get (Re) Started..." article.

While I mostly agree about avoiding 1200 baud AFSK, it's probably worth mentioning that if a 1200 baud network already exists, using it is a great way to make friends and find other people to connect to on a faster/newer modes.

On the equipment side, I'd like to give a plug for the Vera VR-N76 (AKA BTECH UV-Pro or Radioddity GA-5WB) HT. It's the HT sibling of the VR-N7500 headless mobile that you covered on ZR a few years ago. Most of what you see online for this radio is it's APRS features, and the Bluetooth KISS TNC support that was added in later firmware. Both of those are great. The KISS TNC works just like a mobilinkd, but with less clutter, although in my testing it seems the mobilinkd might perform a little better. The downside is it only supports 1200 baud with the internal TNC, for now anyway. I know a few people with this radio who carry it daily and use it for checking Winlink messages automatically on their phones with WoAD or RadioMail. The best feature of this radio, however, is that it supports flat audio on the accessory port. I haven't seen anything about this feature online, including the pinout of the jack, but after BTECH support provided the pinout. I put a cable together and gave VARA-FM a test, and without any real tuning, was achieving sustained speeds of over 14.4kbps. I suspect a little time getting the deviation dialed in will bring the speed up even higher. I was impressed enough to order the newer Vera VR-N7600 mobile to test the capability there.

Finally, while you mentioned BPQ's BBS, I feel like it's worth mentioning some of the other features as well. The BBS is just one application that plugs in to the main node application. The node supports *many* protocols besides plain packet. I'm using VARA HF, VARA FM, Mercury (although I haven't gotten any connects that way yet), ARDOP, and packet. It supports client connections as well emulating AGW and KISS. 44net and IP are supported as well. Supported applications are the BBS (as mentioned) which can do POP/IMAP for personal messages and NNTP for bulletins. A winlink gateway is just another BPQ application. There is a chat server that can connect to chat servers on other nodes. It reminds me of IRC a little. There is also a telnet interface that allows other applications to be connected. One sysop a couple hops away has Zork and a few door games on his node. Other users have built a web gateway that can proxy HTTP using a text-only browser. Most implementations I have seen of that are using PE1RRR (SK)'s Packet Browser here: https://github.com/pe1rrr/packet-browser

Great edition as always.

Ben KU0HN

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