Interesting. Forked from the other project. So many to choose from!

https://github.com/maurizioandreotti/D-Rats

Hi Brad - occasionally and within reason I don't think that would be a problem.

Here's a short article by K1CE from the ARRL "ARES Letter" on October 21, 2020. It provides yet another reason to use technologies like AREDN - preservation of Spectrum for radio amateurs. While the range of these devices is limited to near line-of-site, the high speed and lower power consumption are very compelling. We need people in high places (literally) to make this vision a reality. It would work very well from apartment balconies, towers (of course), hilltops for mobile operations, etc. 73, Chris, VE3NRT. K1CE for a Final: Use or Lose the SHF Bands; Increase Data Speed, Modes for Keeping Up with Needs of Served Partner Agencies The FCC's decision to delete the amateur service from the 3.3 - 3.5 GHz allocation sent a chill down my spine. The message is clear: we must use our super high frequencies (SHF) or risk losing even more access. There is ever-increasing demand by our served partner agencies for higher speed data, digital voice and image transfer, the kinds of data rates that are made possible by the greater bandwidth afforded by our access to the SHF spectrum. There are many forward-thinking amateur groups around the country that are exemplary. The 5 cm amateur band was recently used for filing a wildfire report - on September 8, 2020, two hams in the Puget Sound region of Washington State were watching the live camera feed from the Mt. Baldy HamWAN site and spotted and reported a wildfire in the surrounding forest. The Ham Wide Area Network is a system of commercial microwave radios tuned to the 5.65-5.925 GHz amateur radio band. Data speeds between the link sites vary depending on the path, but speeds four orders of magnitude faster than 9600 baud packet is common. Video cameras with PTZ control have been added to many of the link sites. The use of HamWAN as a backup emergency communications system throughout the Interstate-5 corridor in Washington is growing. The Washington Emergency Management Division EOC, the Washington State Department of Transportation Southwest Region EOC, two county and four city EOCs, three hospitals, and one Red Cross office already have permanent connections (so far). The Northwest Ohio Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network (AREDN) Mesh Steering Committee (Lucas County ARES) conducted a drill focused on setting up individually-owned AREDN Mesh gear, troubleshooting and operating the ancillary gear (phones, cameras, laptops, self-contained power boxes) on an individual basis. Numerous law enforcement officers from Wood County as well as from Lucas and Monroe counties in Michigan were enthusiastic about the Mesh Networking capabilities. In Colorado, the Boulder ATV club installed its new 5.9 GHz, FM-TV beacon transmitter on a government building for the purposes of encouraging microwave experimentation; to get hams to try ATV, especially with the really low cost FM-TV gear now available for drones; to be used as a known signal source for testing antennas and receivers; and to increase usage of our microwave bands, to help prevent their being taken away from us. Use it or lose it. Add microwave apps to your ARES toolkits. There is a wealth of information from ARRL to get you started. A quick click on any search engine will lend more. Copyright © 2020 American Radio Relay League, Incorporated. Posted with permission.

I think the following: A bunch of category 5e or better cable: I have a lot of indoor rated cable which would be fine for testing or temporary use. I'm planning to get some outdoor cable for other applications so a bulk buy would be reasonable to do. I will need a lot of it. I have recently learned the art of crimping RJ45 connectors. A PoE switch. An 8 port switch with 4 powered ports is about $50 Canadian. I have one already. At least 2 devices (one at each end). As I mentioned 39 USD. Some devices with more capability are more expensive. There's a list of MicroTik devices here but not all will be supported. The most expensive is $300. A high place to attach it. That would be the most expensive part for many, but for testing not required. We'd also have to pick a band. 5GHz is probably the most popular around, and has the most bandwidth available but I'd like to study things a bit more before deciding on that. It would be really nice to have some megabits. The use cases around situational awareness, video feeds, telephone systems all look really good. I would pony up some money to get started at my end. We have several people (VA3DCY, VE3IBW, VE3NRT and others) who could build infrastructure to support various types of applications and services, plus gateways to the Internet. Chris

Having watched this, I checked into the RRIE Eastern Net yesterday on 40 metres. There was no traffic for me :-) I could hear the main net control station quite well at the beginning but he faded out. Fortunately they had established secondary net controllers, one of whom was able to check me in and out. One other Canadian ham was present. Unfortunately RRI does not recognize any nets in Eastern Canada as NTS nets. The North American Eastern net seems to be the only option, which points out that NTS in the US is far better established. I don't have a lot of experience with nets so I'd welcome other perspectives. Chris VE3NRT

Next instalment is the very familiar 73, translating to "Best Wishes" or "Best Regards". It is derived from the "92 Code" adopted by Western Union Telegraph in 1859, one of several "Brevity Codes" that are in use in Amateur Radio. These were called "Wire Signals" and were designed to increase the rate and which telegrams were delivered. The only two that have been retained by amateurs are 73 and 88, the latter meaning "Love and Kisses", most often used by YL and XYL (female) amateurs. As the Wikipedia article points out, 30 is still in use by journalists. These codes should not be confused with ARRL numbered radiograms which represent longer messages, e.g. ONE, meaning "Everyone safe here. Please don't worry". Anyway it's lunch time. 21. 73. 30.

The paclink-unx and Pat experiments were successful. These can be useful but lack forms and templates etc. They also cannot do VARA, except perhaps via socket communications over TCP/IP to a Windows PC. There might be a solution the forms support which requires more manual intervention than Winlink-Express but I've done no research into that. Once I figured out how to use the Go runtime enviroment, Pat was very simple to configure and use. Paclink, which interoperates with a mail server, is a bit more complicated to configure.

Results of the experiments with different protocols by Pablo VA3HDL and me. We used P2P mode to send messages to each other. Neither of us had a VARA software licence which provides much higher speed transmission. The licence is $69 US. VA3HDL used his FT991A while VE3NRT used an Elecraft K3. AX.25 Packet, using Direwolf (VE3NRT) and Sound Modem (VA3HDL). Worked well at 1200bps on both 2m FM and 10m SSB. We could not get it working at 9600bps. VA3HDL has an FT991A which has a USB interface without serial port PTT. While the slow speed version of Sound Modem has CAT control, the high speed version doesn't. Direwolf, which supports both low speed and high speed modes in 1 program, does not have CAT control on Windows, although it does on LInux. VE3NRT was able to transmit 9600 bps messages using Direwolf. When VA3HDL put his 2m antenna on his tower he was able to send messages into the Winlink system through the gateway run by VA3MCT. VARA-HF Tried on 80M SSB. Worked fine. VE3NRT tried the mode for standard Winlink messages through several gateways up to 1000 km away. The "slow" mode in VARA send a short message with all headers in about 2 minutes. VARA-FM Tried on 2m which worked well and similar to AX25 1200bps packet. ARDOP This mode, designed for HF, was tried on 80M and worked at about the same speed as VARA-HF. Conclusions All the above modes, with the exception of Direwolf, are quite easy to set up. Sound Modem is favoured by the Winlink community although Linux users may prefer to use Direwolf as it works on Linux and is also open source, unlke the others. ARDOP is also open source but the performance is not fantastic. VARA is the highest performance software modem on both FM and HF but requires a USD 69 licence. It is, however, very popular and there are lots of gateways available. Pactor 4 is higher performance but is more then 10x the price of the VARA licence. Further testing will require VE3NRT to erect a 2m antenna where it can be heard at a distance. This will hopefully be done soon. Chris VE3NRT

I don't think we imagined at the time we'd still be meeting virtually now. Looks like we're in for the long haul.

Several of the 2020 seasons presentations on VHF/UHF digital communications technology at YRARC club meetings mentioned "codeplugs". I more or less understood what they were from the context, but today I decided to look it up. I found this explanation which seems pretty good to me. Let me know if you have any comments or information that would further clarify this term. Just like we still say "the tape is rolling" in an age where tape is hardly used any more, this term is a bit of a relic, having lost its original meaning to the relentless march of technology. Back in the good old days, radios used crystals to control the frequencies and sometimes had internal jumpers for various options. Later on, options were set using a jack on the back of the radio. Plugs had wire jumpers which configured the radio by plugging into the jack. These became the original code plugs. Later on, more things were controlled by these code plugs, such as tone encode/decode. As radios became microprocessor controlled, the external code plugs moved inside the radio as programming information. The term has remained with us even there's not much that still plugs in. The code plug contains the operating frequencies, tone selections, timeout values, system IDs, etc. These days, the code plug is just a relatively small binary file that's transferred to or from the radio and a computer. So it seems a code plug is very similar or identical to a configuration file that we commonly used when programming a radio using the manufacturers configuration software or from third party software like RT Systems.

Winmor is deprecated in favour of ARDOP, VARA and Pactor 3 & 4.

@Ron Gibson VE3CGR Thanks for looking Ron. I'll find something eventually. Chris

Right now trying to get paclink-unix running on a Raspberry Pi. Making progress but it's quite an extensive setup, including compiling from source. It looks promising though, as it marries winlink to a standard email message transfer agent (sendmail or postfix) which would be ideal for 24x7 operation.

It comes and goes. It is usually recommended to ignore it. Continue the QSO if you can otherwise sign off like you would normally. If you do experience any jamming, we'd like to know date/time/duration, nature of jamming, whether you can hear it on the repeater input frequency (and if so, what was the strength and your location), and any unusual or identifiable characteristics (background noise, accent, mispronunciations, unusual words, etc.).

That would be great Ron. Thank you.

Sure. The box is the most important thing. It doesn't matter what's in it.

Hi Ron, most server boxes are probably way too deep for my rack, which was made for audio equipment, but yes, I plan to gut the box and put some other projects into it, including an oven controlled GPS disciplined oscillator, a winlink server and an RTL-SDR receiver.