Neil, The Internet is a very useful thing. And I am not anti-Internet in any way. I just argue against depending on it as a primary transport medium for amateurs. The words "Internet" and "Security" should never be used in the same sentence unless they are talking about the lack of security on the Internet. The easy connectivity that the Internet offers is a strong lure, but it is also a weakness. There are a number of EComm systems that are doing Internet linking using IRLP/Eckolink to link their repeaters together. And then they say that this will be there in an emergency. Having been through a few of those, the Internet (like electricity, fuel and roads) is usually one of the first things that is lost. Some of the floods they have had in the mid-west have shown that weakness. We are supposed to be more robust than that. We are supposed to work when all that other stuff fails. Packet has suffered from routing issues (something the Internet does as second nature) since I learned about it a long time ago. The lack of routing ability is why I never got into it. It was good for a couple of hops, but past that it was a crap-shoot that you would be able to route your message without a lot of playing around. I believe that had a lot to do with the collapse and the transition to the Internet. Today, should something happen to the Internet, I highly doubt (keep in mind that I am not a packet expert) that a message could get from one side of the country to the other using packet, without putting it on some other mode. That generally means that some manual transaction has to occur. We use packet here in Tucson, but only as a local thing, almost like APRS (with larger messages). I know we can get stuff to Phoenix with Packet, but I doubt that we could reach CA, NM or even Flagstaff with packet from here without some manual intervention if the Internet went away. I will have to ask someone who is much more versed in packet than I am. By the same argument though, if you are running packet over the Internet, it isn't packet "radio" any more, it is email. In that sense, everyone practices packet these days. 73 David, AC7DS
--- On Tue, 1/19/10, Neil <[email protected]> wrote: From: Neil <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Re: New guy To: [email protected] Date: Tuesday, January 19, 2010, 4:01 PM I agree, those that sit in front of a PC all day without RF are not 'radio' amateurs. The thing about D-Star IS the connectivity,... [Snip] A lot of packet backbones went over to the Internet ... [Snip]
