Under Construction***

This page is about my history with packet radio, EBN, MAPRA, NYEPRA, NEPRA, NAPRA, and NEDA.

In 1981 I was living and working in Troy NY and met up with a group of hams in the Albany area that were building repeaters for fun.  One was WA2WNI, Dana. More on him later.  I also helped out at with a week signal contesting group called W2SZ/1 that did contesting from Mount Greylock. 

In January 1992 I moved to New Jersey.  During the move I was working with Steve, KA2EIA, to build a repeater to go at a high and barely accessible location in north west New Jersey at Catfish.  After the move Steve KA2EIA,  Bob, WB2DWD and I were partners on the operation.  We put up a 220 repeater at the same site.  (The 220 repeater was never supported enough to function well)

In 1983 I moved to Pennsylvania and added a 6 meter remote receiver that linked over to the Catfish site.  I also put up a 70cm repeater in PA and helped build a very sophisticated repeater on 220Mhz with voice response, crosslinks to another site and a synthesized remote base. 

Up in Albany, Dana, WA2WNI, linked his repeater down to our Catfish site.  This was getting interesting. 

In early 1984 I got talked into packet radio by a fellow from California whose callsign and name I don't remember.  He drove a white Mustang with antennas mounted through the trunk so he'll know who he is if he reads this. 

He wanted me to find him a TAPR TNC when I went out to Dayton that year.  I got one of the devices used from somebody I knew instead.  I went out to Dayton with Dana, WA2WNI who wanted to get into computers.  I helped him choose some parts. 

I later acquired a Kantronics TNC and eventually a pair of TAPR TNC-2s. 

In summer of 1984 I was recommended by Jon WB2MNF and Joe KC2TN to go down to the MAPRA meeting in Maryland and talk about digipeaters because a friend, K3LZ, had a wonderful site that they both thought could be handy.  Larry, K3LZ, and I went to the MAPRA meeting where they were looking for somebody to put a digi up in eastern PA to allow WB4APR in Havre de Grace MD to digi to WB2KMY in Beacon NY.  The plan was to participate in what was to be called the Eastnet Backbone.  Soon after that meeting I put on K3LZ-1 digipeater in Easton on Gafney Hill (sp?). 

The digipeater used a TAPR TNC1 in a shielded enclosure with industrial RCA terminal, Kenwood 7950 and Astron 20 supply.  The antenna was a phased dual 4-element beam array with the antennas favoring the two directions of interest, north-east and south.   The antennas were mounted on their own 60' tower with a clear line of sight for 50 miles south and 25 miles north east.

With K3LZ-1 on the air I was finally able to keyboard with packeteers outside of the town that I was living in (Quakertown PA).  I was able to fairly reliably keyboard with friends in New Jersey and around PA.  By digipeating twice I was able to work WA2WNI.  Every time I connected to Dana and started chatting, everybody in range of the digipeaters seemed to hop on and try the same path as we were using.  Our connection usually lasted about three text lines each way before it all came to a crashing halt.

Later that year I ran into some old friends from NJ including W2VY (one of the founders of the Sussex County Amateur Radio Club and a close friend of Steve, KA2EIA who I built Catfish with.) and N2DSY.  They were working on a project called Gatorswitch which was a packet radio networking software package.  Gatorswitch allowed a station to connect from TNC to TNC, having passed through a couple of mid-points, with site to site acknowledgement.  This eventually evolved into ROSE networking.  W2VY and N2DSY had founded a club called RATS, Radio Amateur Telecommunications Society. 

In 1986 I moved to Nashua New Hampshire.  This is about the same time that NETROM and TheNET started showing up on the east coast.  I figured out how to keyboard to keyboard with Dana in Albany.  At first the path was to digipeat through a digi in Deerfield NH and through Mount Greylock Mass, both on 145.05.  Another path on 145.07 existed by going from K1TR in Windham NH to a digi in Providence Rhode Island and then across Connecticut.  This didn't work very well.  Most of the time it was very much a waiting game.  The process was not automated and was slow. 

I attended a meeting of NEPRA, New England Packet Radio Association, which, contrary to its name, is attended almost exclusively by people on the Boston Metro Area.  There were a couple of attendees from western Mass but I'm not sure how often they came.   There were about 15 attendees.  K1UGM was the president, WB1DSW, the treasurer.  One thing that bothered me about the conversation at the meetings was that often one person or another would mention a document, file, map, or whatever, that would be on one person's BBS or another.  Since I lived in distant New Hampshire (one hill too far) I couldn't reach any of the BBSs being discussed.  Since the only way to bounce around was through digipeaters that were on disparate frequencies, unless you were within range of practically ALL of the digipeaters, you couldn't count on getting to every BBS.  The group seemed pretty happy and progressive and they had a newsletter once in a while.  They were pretty focused on getting new people on the air with packet and that was ok.

I decided to set up a bulletin board to automate the process of passing packet traffic from me to WNI.  I figured I could put it on the same frequency as the two digis I was using and send the traffic down that path.  I couldn't get any help setting up the BBS.  The couldn't even find copies of the executables.  There didn't seem to be a good source for them.  There were lots of local BBSs but they seemed actually scared that I might want to use the software.  Interesting.  Dana got a copy and mailed it to me on floppy. 

I set up a bulletin board.  As soon as I got the board running I was contacted by Herb, WB1DSW in Kingston NH.  He had been running a BBS for a while and was a close friend of W0RLI, Hank, who wrote the software that Herb and I were both using. 

Herb suggested that to run a BBS using the formula that the locals had agreed upon I should find a 2m frequency that was not in use in the area, and then forward to Herb on UHF.  Currently there was a UHF digi on Mt. Washington.  In addition, Lindsey, NR1N (now k1jy), had a dual port NETROM node up on Concord (node name was CENTNH) on 145.05 and 445.6.. 

Right about that time WB2KMY, Doug (keeper of the Mt Beacon digi-above) moved up to Schenectady from Poughkeepsie and made contact with Dana.  Doug was also involved with the repeaters on Mt. Beacon and we had talked several times on the various repeaters back when I was working with Catfish.  Doug had copies of TheNET.  He was working with a group called Eastnet Backbone Network.  This apparently was a more formal organization that had taken up the goals of the Eastnet Backbone that MAPRA was working on several years before. 

EBN had a plan to put nodes on mountaintops from Havre-de-Grace up to as far north as they could go.  The nodes would each be three ports.  They would have a UHF port on 438.425 running at 1800baud (that baud rate selected to confuse hackers), a 220Mhz port on a frequency selected to be different from the other mountaintops, and a 2m frequency for user access.  The 220 frequency would be used to feed lower level dual port user access gateways to 2 meters, and to feed bulletin boards.  The UHF frequency, which was the same for all mountains, would be the backbone.  Currently EBN had the three port nodes working in eastern PA, not too far from K3LZ-1 which was still on the air, northern NJ at WA2SNA (NNJ node), Mount Beacon (ENY), and Mount Greylock (WMA).  I think there were a couple of more sites in the NY metro area at that time.  Doug suggested that I put up one of these three port nodes in my area to link to Greylock on the UHF frequency.  He supplied me with a modified TNC that would do the funny baud rate.  I told him that I'd work on finding a mountaintop site but that I hadn't made contact with any yet.  Doug was confident that I could find one because of my success with Catfish and Easton PA (K3LZ digi). 

At the same time Dana, WA2WNI, and I were still trying to figure out reliable ways to communicate digitally.  We could easily talk on FM because we could each work both 224.1 repeater and 53.23 repeaters on Mount Greylock but we both had a lust for digital connectivity.  More on this shortly.

Using TheNET, which Doug had initiated me on, I built a dual port node in Nashua to allow my bulletin board to access Concord and Mount Washington.  The system I put together was 144.99 at my house for the user port on my BBS, 445.1 as a 2nd "forwarding port" at my house.  Then at Larry, KA1CRN's house in south Nashua (where I was partner in a 220 repeater) I put up a dual port TheNET node on 445.1 and 445.6.  445.6 was the frequency of the Mount Washington digi and the NR1N/Concord dual port node.  This allowed my BBS to forward with WB1DSW and K1UGM BBSs (the two local 'hub' BBSs). 

I still didn't have a way to get to WNI though so this got boring pretty quickly.   K1TR was operating a digipeater on 145.07 which was one of the paths I could use to get to Dana.  I contacted K1TR and with his help and permission, moved my dual port node from KA1CRN's house to K1TR and made it a three port node.  We named it SNH.   This worked to get from me to Dana but was no less tedious than what we had before the BBSs, and nodes. 

Dana built a dual port node following EBN's form and put it on east of Albany.   The node had a user port on 2 meters called ALB144 and a 220 port on Mt. Greylock's 220 frequency.

Once a month I was going to NEPRA meetings.  Now I had access to my own BBS.   I was able to mail the good files back and forth to the other BBSs.  Still the hams that I talked to in my local area couldn't get to anything that wasn't on my BBS or one of the other BBSs that they could reach.  You couldn't go from Nashua to a BBS in the south end of Boston, for instance.  One project of NEPRA's was to put a TheNET node up in the Springfield area.  This was a joint project with NEPRA and MTARA (Mount Tom Amateur Radio Association). 

I created a single sheet map of the TheNET network as I knew it including a list of TheNET commands.

In early 1988 Packet Radio was getting crowded.  There were many people interested in packet but the infrastructure that we were building was frequency expensive.   Basically each station needed their own frequency for it to work well.  So, if you wanted 10 users on at a time you had to have 10 channels for it to work well, or 5 channels for it to work poorly.  We had several hundred users who, more-or-less, wanted to use packet in the same short periods of time.  We needed to make packet work more efficiently.  Furthermore, I still didn't have a way to get to WNI in real time.  The best I could do was to send a message on my BBS, and then wait for it to get forwarded through about 6 BBSs before it arrived at Dana's.   Usually this would happen in a single night. 

Another problem was that a newcomer to packet radio could find out all they wanted about putting a station on the air but practically nothing about owning/operating server software, including TheNET or BBS programs.  TheNET was not commonly promoted as a user topic and BBS operation documents were for the user side only.  It was as if the packet community wanted to create a class structure of sysops and users. 

At a NEPRA meeting I brought up the idea of putting up many TheNET nodes across New England to connect Boston with Albany.  There was intense discussion including the mention of people who had already offered to host nodes.  K1UGM, NEPRA president, dismissed the idea.  It seemed to me that the ambitions of some of the people ended when BBS forwarding worked well.  The idea of promoting live keyboarding to remote stations (which is what I wanted to do with WA2WNI in Albany) was foreign or bad.   Some of the membership were very interested in the idea.   From one discussion I found out about Ken, KA1OXQ in Oakham. 

Fall 1988 ?

Ken, KA1OXQ had a tower and lived on a hill west of Worcester MA.  From his hill we could see many of the server stations in Boston and the Mount Tom digipeater/node.   K1MEA, an officer in the Mount Tom Club and member of NAPRA, had installed a dual port NET/ROM node on Mount Tom.  The node had two radios, one on 145.05 (the same frequency as the Mt Greylock EBN node, and as the Deerfield NH digipeater I'd been using to talk to Dana, and the WB1DSW BBS in East Kingston NH), the other on 221 MHz.   KA1OXQ could also see Mount Greylock on 220Mhz.  I hoped that he could see Mount Greylock on UHF.  The only problem with putting a link to Mount Greylock on UHF was that I needed a radio that could be tuned to 438 MHz.  So, I sacrificed my satellite station for the link.  I talked to Ken and we arranged to put a 3 port node up at his house.  We'd be on 220Mhz to Mt Tom, UHF to Greylock, and VHF for local users and an additional UHF radio on the same frequency as K1TR, Mount Washington and K1BKE.

The UHF link to Greylock didn't work from OXQ's house.  I added another 220 rig to the mix and we linked to Greylock on it's 220 port.  We now had a 4 port node, UHF to K1TR, 2m to users, 221.17 to Greylock and 221.13 to Mount Tom. 

Finally, I could keyboard from Nashua to Albany NY.  That path was 145.07 at my house, to K1TR's SNH node in Windham, to KA1OXQ's node in Oakham MA, to K1FFK Mount Greylock, to WA2WNI's node east of Albany, to Dana's house. 

WB1DSW was forwarding traffic via Windham to Oakham to Mt Tom to K1MEA's BBS. 

January 1989

I did a map showing the current situation.  The map showed MBOS:N1CSI as a node