[nos-bbs] Some info on Winlink 2000

[Rick Williams]

Like most things, there are different perspectives or reasons for doing
things. While the winlink 2000 folks do overreach with their belief that
they have an emergency communications messaging system,  they are not
banning Pactor I as a central policy decision. Rather, some of the HF PMBO
stations are not allowing such connects anymore due to the tremendous
difference in time it takes to use the system. This makes it more available
for others since there are only so many hours available with propagation.

Is that true that some only allow P3 connects? I had not heard that.

>From what I have seen, the Winlink 2000 administrator  does not tend to
promote AirMail as a client. Actually, they tend to steer people to their
own Paclink client.. There seems to be some friction between them and the
AirMail developer based on comments made in the past year. I asked the
Winlink 2000 administrator about this and he said it was due to them moving
rapidly in development which caused some strain from the AirMail developer.
I am a bit skeptical about that.

The reason for the prevention of keyboarding is due to other hams constant
attack against any of us who promote HF networking. The casual users,
contesters, DXers, etc., simply do not want us cluttering up "their" bands
with wide band modes that carry very little traffic which would occur if you
are using P3 for casual keyboarding use. As it is they oppose networking on
HF and particularly any e-mail or other internet connections via HF.  So to
reduce complaints KB modes have been left out. In fact, as one of the beta
testers of SCAMP, I too was a bit disappointed that they specifically
designed Packlink SCD (the SCAMP client) to not have any possibility of
keyboarding. Again, they do not want to be criticized for taking up even
more space with a wide band mode used for "only" keyboarding.

If you have not used Paclink SCD it is a superbly written piece of software.
Amazing, considering how short a time Rick, KN6KB had to develop the
program. And he has perhaps changed everything for the future because of his
outstanding software detect of busy channels. Unfortunately, the RDFT
protocols used in the program are only useable for fairly good S/N ratios (>
10 db) and this has held up further testing until he is able to incorporate
new protocols that will work with weaker signals. He does not have linux
programming ability so has been getting help from others including Bob
McGwier, N4HY, to convert some of the linux based routines to work in the MS
Windows environment. When the S/N ratio is adequate, the program does very
well indeed and surpasses Pactor 2. Of course it is 4 times wider.

I keep hoping for a new beta with weaker signal abilities. The other good
news about this is that Rick has indicated that SCAMP will be GPL'd and I am
very hopeful that within a few years, someone will then come up with some
way to use this ARQ mode for HF sound card.

Come to think of it, perhaps this could be incorporated into JNOS2. Can you
imagine what this would mean in practical terms? If the weak signal
abilities are good enough (at or maybe slightly below zero db S/N), then
those of use who are not willing to buy the SCS box would have a true ARQ
adaptable mode on HF.

73,

Rick, KV9U





-----Original Message-----
From: nos-bbs-bounces at lists.tapr.org
[mailto:nos-bbs-bounces at lists.tapr.org]On Behalf Of Demetre Valaris
Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2005 14:58
To: maiko at pcs.mb.ca; 'TAPR xNOS Mailing List'
Subject: RE: [nos-bbs] Cross posting: [Fwd: [wl2kemcomm] Heads up...]


Hi Maiko,



Neither has anyone here I believe. It is the attitude of some of the
developers
that bother me. First of all they think they know it all and second they
want
to impose their ideas only. For a start they started banning PACTOR I
from
PMBOs and they tend towards using PACTOR III only in some. This is not
very good thinking. Also they try to promote the one and only client
"Airmail",
they do not allow anyone using the keyboard to send e-mail on HF and
they
do not like anyone using the keyboard to send e-mail via a TELPAC node
either.
They say that "keyboarding" is bad and it is only accepted for test
purposes
on the TELPAC and it is not allowed on HF.


Each time a user connects to JNOS he can type TELPAC, hit ENTER and he
is connected to a Winlink PMBO. We can have many aliases or someone can
think of a way to try many PMBOs in a rotational basis should the first
one in the
list fail to reply.

Another way is the use DL5DI's TELPAC node in LINUX if you are using
AX25 in the
LINUX kernel. It is dead easy to install but it does nothing else. It
just connects you to
a WINLINK 2000 PMBO.

> Maiko Langelaar / VE4KLM

===
73 de Demetre Valaris - SV1UY
e-mail  sv1uy at ham.depa.gr
webpage http://www.athnet.ampr.org/~sv1uy
        http://sv1uy.ampr.org/~sv1uy
SSTV_RX http://sv1uy.ampr.org/~sv1uy/sstv_rx.html



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