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<p><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The entire packet
scene in Oz could have been very different, and probably
reasonably effective if we hadn't believed that BS about being
able to digi through eight stations to cover vast differences,
and if we'd adopted duplex links between nodes to avoid a
horrendous collision problem on the Rose half-duplex backbone
frequency (in NSW), but I doubt that anything could have been
done to save it at the end of the day. <br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">People believed a lot
of hype, bought gear, saturated a single frequency, and then
found it wasn't for them, and they stashed the TNC away to
gather dust.</font></p>
<p><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Lots of (turbid) water
under shaky bridges.</font></p>
<p><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Did the Netrom ID
problem ever get resolved or did the PMG/DoTC/ACA/ACMA/whatever
accept that Netrom wasn't a threat to national security so they
turned a blind eye to it.<br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Ray vk2tv<br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"></font><br>
</p>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 16/10/17 21:02, Carl Makin wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:BC6204DB-6C49-400D-B046-37D6EC0CFAC8@stagecraft.cx">
<pre wrap="">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.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On 16 Oct 2017, at 5:14 pm, Glen English VK1XX <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:glenlist@pacificmedia.com.au"><glenlist@pacificmedia.com.au></a> wrote:
I remember Barry saying this and that about netrom, rose etc...the
arguments between opposing camps were heated.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
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.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On 16/10/2017 3:49 PM, vk2tv wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
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.
</pre>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
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.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">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.
</pre>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
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.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">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.
</pre>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
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.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">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.
</pre>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
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)
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</pre>
</blockquote>
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