Back in the day– mid 1990’s– I did some experimenting with packet radio with an MS-DOS laptop and a Baycom TNC. It was not fancy, but I could sit outside on the lawn at LSU-Shreveport and connect to other stations and nodes. The Internet hadn’t become widely available quite yet, Wifi hadn’t either, and it was cool being wireless. I played around a little on the local DX Cluster and BBS’s, and was able to eventually receive a packet (yes, one packet) of data from space shuttle Columbia as it flew overhead. I also experimented a bit with TexNet; it took some effort to get to the nearest node in east Texas, but once there I could connect to anywhere in Texas.
I am also inclined to remember farther back in the day– mid to late 1980’s– when I connected my 1200 baud modem to the telephone system, and made use of Telenet and Tymnet. These networks were packet switched networks that allowed you to connect to a local node on the network, and from there connect to any host on the network through a shared backbone circuit. On Telenet, I’d type “C 41412″, and that would connect me (my terminal) to whatever host was connected to node 414 12 (414 being the area code, and 12 being the individual host).
There were all kinds of hosts on Telenet– most were businesses, some were universities, some were government agencies. Most people didn’t connect to Telenet for recreation (although some of us did- *cough*). Generally, if you were dialing in to something like Telenet, you were doing so because you needed to access resources on the host at the other end of the circuit.
In the 1990’s I got bored with packet radio because, while it was cool to say I could connect to the other side of Texas via TexNet– there was nothing to connect to once I got there. (At least with Telenet, there was the challenge of trying to gain access to the host at the other end once you’d connected. Again, *cough*.)
Today, as I’m writing this, I have Xastir running on my other monitor, watching APRS. I can see stations from all over Wisconsin, eastern Minnesota, northeastern Iowa, and northern Illinois. Most of those stations are repeaters, igates, and weather stations (and many of those are all of the above). There are a few people driving around the state, including truck drivers. I occasionally see a notice for a net, or an ARES meeting attached to a station. Technically speaking, I’m not really “on” APRS– I don’t have a keying circuit connected to my radio (yet), so I don’t appear on the map (yet). But I can watch packets coming in.
It’s interesting reading online about how APRS routes traffic, and then watching the raw packets. The picture becomes even more clear when I watch aprs.fi on my other monitor– aprs.fi graphically shows the route an APRS packet takes, and I can compare that to what I see on RF. There’s a lot of learning going on here: setting up devices in Ubuntu Linux to get soundmodem and Xastir working, making the hardware connections between sound card and radio, watching how propagation on 144.390mhz changes from day to night (and on PropNET).
I can see 103 stations on my map. A few of them provide weather data, a few provide position data, a few are repeaters showing frequency and PL info. I’ve been able to scroll around, and look at areas where I like to get outside and play– places like Eagle River, WI– and see what kind of connectivity I can expect when I’m camping in the middle of a National Forest next summer. That’s valuable information as well; many of the places I like to camp are without reliable cell voice service, much less data. It is useful to know that some guy in a truck that lives 4.6 miles from my future campsite can reliably reach a digipeater– that means I probably can, too.
APRS is popular, and for good reason. I’ve become a fan, and I think APRS is a cool application of amateur packet radio. I’ve been learning a lot from playing with APRS. I think it’s important, though, to remember that APRS isn’t the only application for AX.25. DX-clusters and Winlink2000 are also both useful applications– but in the 40-odd years amateur radio operators have been tinkering with AX.25, is this it? Isn’t there something else useful we can come up with, between AX.25 and the Internet, that we want to do at the other end of the circuits we create?
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