Packet radio - alive and well, or relegated to the dust bin?

[N8YX]

At one time, this was a fascinating (to me) mode and I threw a considerable amount of effort and cash into building one of the largest BBS/gateway nodes in the region. Three HF (2 300 baud; one 1200 baud on 10M), three VHF (2 2M and one 223MHz) ports, plus a landline dial-in for remote monitoring when I was away.

The death of the upstream SysOp (and with it, his system) meant no feed to the BBS. Thus, I shut it off in 2003 or thereabouts. Was a good run.

Recently I dragged out one of the KAMs and connected it to the Yaesu side of da hizzle (see the NCS thread in the 'Gadgets and High Tech' sub-forum). There isn't too much on HF these days with the exception of Network 105 (14.105LSB) but VHF seems awash with interesting - albeit different - possibilities.

One of these is APRS. Anyone playing with it? I started reconditioning some other gear for use in portable operation...a KPC-3, which will be used with a VX-7R. Even snagged an old Tandy Model 102 for use as a terminal.

[KD8TUT]

Oh Gosh....

I run an iGate here in Michigan. It's RF to IS since I sit under the umbrella of the W8MAI digipeater which covers south west Michigan really well.

Most of my gated traffic is hams on the beach, hams driving by, and the local beacons. So that's what I give to the network. In the rare case where W8MAI has gone down my system steps in nicely.

What I take from the network is mapped with APRSIS32 into a human readable map showing the real time 2 meter propagation. Since I'm a VHF/UHF nut it's really fun to be able to generate that kind of information.

Current propagation:
16126

[KD8TUT]

Things may get interesting this afternoon... looks like things may open up across the lake:


16127

[kb2vxa]

I tried APRS when it was in it's infancy, RF store and forward only so it took a couple of weeks for the map to fill in west to the Mississippi and went no farther. Being slower than molasses running uphill in January I put my TNC and dedicated radio on packet with very good results. This was at the beginning of The Forwarding Wars, some weed in the Midwest was going on about "land line lids" railing against Internet forwarding that was the only thing barely holding the crumbling network together. We had a fair go of it, I was even a remote sysop for the central New Jersey node linking Southern NJ and SEPA to northern NJ, NY and the world. I had some very interesting conversations on the BBS with hams mostly in the UK, Germany, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand until 3 UK trolls attacked and chased everybody away, The Day The Packet Died. As sysop I was losing links to the West and Canada left and right, other sysops helped me find new links, then they went down, a once fine network had more holes than Swiss cheese. When I moved and became antennaless I was picked up via Telnet by a BBS in West Australia state for a time, there was nothing but robots left, so much for what was once a viable part of Amateur Internet............