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Description:
It was in March, 1980, that the Federal Communications
Commission approved the transmission of ASCII for Amateur Radio in the
United States. That was a year and a half after Canadian hams had been
authorized to transmit digital "packet radio", and the Canadians
had already been working on a protocol for it. Doug Lockhart, VE7APU,
of Vancouver, British Columbia, had developed a device that he called
a terminal node controller (TNC). It worked with a modem to convert ASCII
to modulated tones and convert the demodulated tones back to ASCII. Doug
had also formed the Vancouver Amateur Digital Communications Group (VADCG)
and named his TNC the "VADCG board".
Hams here in the U.S. started experimenting with the VADCG
board, but in December, 1980, a ham from the San Francisco Bay Area, Hank
Magnuski, KA6M, put a digital repeater on 2 meters using a TNC that he
had developed. A group of hams interested in Hank's TNC started working
together on further developments in packet radio and formed the Pacific
Packet Radio Society (PPRS). AMRAD, the Amateur Radio Research and Development
Corporation, in Washington, DC became the center for packet work on the
east coast, and in 1981 a group of hams in Tucson, Arizona, founded the
Tucson Amateur Packet Radio Corporation (TAPR).
Working together these groups developed a modified version
of the commercial X.25 protocol called Amateur X.25 (AX.25) and in November,
1983, TAPR released the first TNC in kit form, the TAPR TNC1. In 1984,
a great deal of packet experimentation was done, software for packet bulletin
board systems was developed, and packet radio started becoming more and
more popular all across the U.S. and Canada.
Packet Radio was one of the major developments to hit the
world of Amateur Radio and thousands of hams soon caught the "packet
bug". If you're wondering what it's all about and why so many people
got so excited about it, continue reading. You're about to find out.
References: -
http://www.choisser.com/packet/ |
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