Something that I think would go a LONG way toward encouraging a new breed to get into amateur radio is not just saying "You can do digital -- oh and here's a $25 Chinese handheld FM radio" but a $50 (or less) TNC that connects your UV-5R (or equivalent) radio to your computer or smartphone so the cost of going from zero to slinging packets on AX.25 is under $100 (not counting the cost of your computer or phone, of course).<p>Does anything like that exist?
Love this as a concept.<p>Any radio amateurs here? What do you actually end up doing with your setups? Do you have conversations with other amateurs or something else?<p>If it wasn’t completely obvious, I don’t really know much about the ”scene.”
Once you decide sending packets from point A to point B is a good idea, one must look at what percentage of the available bandwidth is actually usable.<p>Many hams think of packet radio in terms of building a single station, for a user-end-terminal, or for a relay, and generally going along with the current in-use frequency for the purpose of getting access to existing other stations.<p>This turns out to be a bad idea though because channel bandwidth is mostly wasted when participating on the same channel as other disinterested parties to whom you will be interfere, and take interference from. The channel bandwidth actually achieving good result (i.e. message delivery) on a shared channel is pretty minuscule compared to the available bandwidth, because of necessary redundancy, or because of retries, combine with channel time lost to collisions, weak signal, and back-off channel sharing timers.<p>A much more efficient approach works by having the new station actually consider themselves part of a network, and then creating a cooperative dedicated collision free channel to the next station. This, however, requires considering two stations at a time when "getting on packet". I highly recommend this method as it results in far better channel performance.<p>NCPACKET.ORG has 35 stations in a well thought out network, and they can run IRC-LIKE 20-way chat sessions which are lively and non-directed, with impunity, and low latency (60 seconds or less from end to end of an 8-hop-wide network).