[OZAPRS] (no subject)

Carl Makin carl at stagecraft.cx
Mon Oct 16 21:02:04 AEDT 2017


Hi Glen,
Wow, big topic to dive into.

The short answer to “what happened to packet radio” is really “The Internet” I suspect.  It really died in the late 90s when Internet access became commonplace making packet radio look old and slow, and packet radio never really grew beyond 1200 baud.

> On 16 Oct 2017, at 5:14 pm, Glen English VK1XX <glenlist at pacificmedia.com.au> wrote:
> I remember Barry saying this and that about netrom, rose etc...the
> arguments between opposing camps were heated.

It got very personal and nasty in a number of situations. There were essentially 3 groups in NSW, AAPRA which promoted Rose, a loose group of Hams promoting Net/ROM and a bunch of experimenters who were playing with TCP/IP via KA9Q Net/Nos that basically ignored everyone else.  I could name names, but that would probably be a bad idea...

The nastiness co-incided with a heap of infighting in the VK2 Division at the time and many of the same people were involved.

> On 16/10/2017 3:49 PM, vk2tv wrote:
>> 
>> Being on the mid north coast of NSW has isolated me from much of what
>> used to happen with Rose/Netrom networks, and since I retired my FBB
>> BBS (6 radio ports plus axudp to a number of overseas stations) about
>> seven years back I've lost pretty much all contact.

I’m much the same Ray.  I ran a dual port BBS here in the ACT for quite a while, but when I was getting less than 1 login a day it wasn’t worth the electricity. 

>> Sydney was predominantly Rose, as was the north coast and the New
>> England (Armidale/Glen Innes/etc) but Netrom did persist in other
>> areas of the state.

Netrom sorta came after Rose in the SE part of NSW.  

Net/ROM wasn’t viable at the time as it ran foul of the legal requirement for every packet to contain the ID of the sender, receiver and transmitter of the packet, but there were people lobbying for that restriction to be lifted.  

In the meantime Rose was installed on a number of digipeaters around the place, locally including Tumut and Mt Canobolas.  It broke the ability to digipeat further than 2 hops which, while unreliable, did work reasonably often so a lot of the casual operators locally got bored and switched off.

At some point, the regs were changed allowing Net/ROM, and Tumut and many others were converted across. It did work for a while, but most of the traffic was people connecting to BBSs 100s of KM away to read the same messages they could read on their local BBS.

I also suspect BBSs were part of the problem.  The amount of message traffic soared until the channel was basically full of nothing else.  At one point I had daily 9600 baud dial-up modem links with vk3ave in Melbourne and vk2ehq in Sydney to move bbs traffic (via Fidonet as compressed files) as the volume was too great for the local channel.  Most of the traffic was crap.

>> wound up. Prior to the closure of the Newcastle hub some ground had
>> been covered establishing 4k8 inter-node links on dedicated RF pairs
>> to replace the 440.050 1k2 half-duplex links that were choked with
>> traffic. But even at that point in time interest in packet was
>> declining rapidly and its future was pretty much set in stone.

Pretty much the same here.  We couldn’t put 7575 on Mt Ginini as it had a 2A-B problem with 6950 so we put a 4800 baud HAPN digi on 4800, which got a bit of use with the TCP/IP guys, but not much else.  At one point Alan, vk2kaw in Wagga came up on 4800 and we were exchanging BBS traffic but by then things were on the way down.

The Net/ROM network in SE NSW was also finally connected enough so that you could get reliable connectivity into Sydney, but it was extremely slow and by then most people had moved on.

>> BTW Glen, I was a member of the Central Coast ARC back around 1983
>> when fellow member John Tanner, VK2ZXQ introduced us to packet, and
>> the club bought a Vancouver TNC prior to the short-lived bun fight
>> over Vancouver protocol vs TAPR.

The first TNCs here in the ACT were Vancouver TNCs and they started out running V1.  AX25 didn’t come here until 6 months later when a heap of us bought TNC2 kits and got them on air.


Carl.
(vk1kcm)



More information about the OZAPRS mailing list