hckrnws

I haven't done any AX.25 (or KISS) for over 30 years. Is it still a thing, or has the packet radio community moved on to something better? Back when I began, there were no turn-key solutions, so you often needed to modify your radio to get something on the air. This was especially true for 9600 baud FSK setups.

For a while, there was a community of stations creating an infrastructure similar to the dial-up BBS world, including message forwarding (UUCP).

There were even a few Internet gateways for a while. (I ran one of the two that were reachable from my corner of LA.) I imagine they're everywhere today.

(Getting married and raising children can quash a lot of hobbies.)

I also wonder about the state of packet radio.

When I had time, I had no money for equipment. Now that I have money and knowledge, no time…

Fuck. Yeah. Bud. I have a userland AX.25 stack I wrote as my pandemic project, and pairing that with MeshTNC will be a dream come true for me. My stack has a few utilities for bridging KISS interfaces together, and exposing APRS-IS as a KISS interface itself, so I can definitely see a lot of cool things coming from this. (If I were feeling extra spicy, I could bind, say, /bin/login to a specific SSID and get a shell into my home machine from across town!)

ax.25 tcp/ip is doable and Battle-tested :)

why reinvent tre whell?

Been quite a while since I've seen that word use outside of an LLM context.

I haven't encountered this term outside of stable diffusion and could probably do with a primer of what this is about.

LoRa is short for Long Range. It's basically about providing a physical layer for networks over radio using spread spectrum modulation. It's got long range, even for fairly low-power devices, but also low bandwidth. Think IoT stuff. LoRaWAN is a layer above in the network stack (MAC) and runs on top of LoRa.

TNC is "terminal node controller". They're kinda sorta like modems for radios. KISS TNC is a particular protocol for communication between a radio and a TNC.