Amateur Packet Radio

* 1&lt communications&gt (PR) The use of packet radio by amateurs to communicate between computers PR is a complete amateur radio computer network with digipeaters (relays), mailboxes (BBS) and other special nodes
In Germany, it is on HF, say, 2m (300 and 1200 BPS), 70cm (1200 to 9600 BPS), 23cm (normally 9600 BPS and up, currently most links between digipeaters) and higher frequencies There is a KW (short wave) Packet Radio at 300 BPS, too
Satellites with OSCAR (Orbiting Sattelite Carring Amateur Radio) transponders (mostly attached to commercial satellites by the AMateur SATellite (AMSAT) group) carry Packet Radio mailboxes or digipeaters
There are both on-line and off-line services on the packet radio network: You can send electronic mail, read bulletins, chat, transfer files, connect to on-line DX-Clusters (DX=far distance) to catch notes typed in by other HAMs about the hottest international KW connections currently coming up (so you can pile up)
PR uses AX25 (an X25 derivative) as its transport layer and sometimes even TCP/IP is transmitted over AX25 AX25 is like X25 but the adressing uses HAM calls like DG8MGV
There are special wormholes all over the world which tunnel amateur radio traffic through the Internet to forward mail Sometimes mails travels over satelites Normally amateur satellites have strange orbits, however the mail forwarding or maibox satellites have very predictable orbits Some wormholes allow HAMs to bridge from Internet to AMPR-NET, eg db0fhoamprorg or db0fhoet-inffho-emdende, but only if you are registered HAM
Because amateur radio is not for profit, it must not be interconnected to the Internet but it may be connected through the Internet All people on the (completely free) amateur radio net must be licensed radio amateurs and must have a call which is unique all over the world
There is a special domain AMPRORG (44***) for amateur radio reserved in the IP space This domain is split between countries, which can further subdivide it For example 44130** is Germany, 4413058* is Augsburg (in Bavaria), and 441305820 is dg8mgvamprorg (you may verify this with nslookup)
Mail transport is only one aspect of packet radio You can talk interactively (as in chat), read files, or play silly games built in the Packet Radio software Usually you can use the autorouter to let the digipeater network find a path to the station you want However there are many (sometimes software incompatible) digipeaters out there, which the router cannot use Paths over 1000 km are unlikely to be useable for real-time communication and long paths can introduce significant delay times (answer latency)
Other uses of amateur radio for computer communication include RTTY ( baudot), AMTOR, PACTOR, and CLOVER
A huge hamradio archive
Usenet newsgroup: news:recradioamateurpacket
(2001-05-12)
English Related Words* 5 radio altimeter
* adaptive radio
* airborne radio
* airborne radio relay
* airborne radio transmitters and receivers
* allotment (of a radio frequency or radio frequency channel)
* amateur
* amateur actor
* amateur athletic association
* amateur detective
* amateur flying
* amateur frequency band
* amateur movie camera
* amateur photographer
* amateur photography