Gidday Paul

There has been for years

The NOS TCP/IP over AX25 system that was setup around the late 1980's
allows you to have gateways with various interfaces and tunnels. ie
connected radios, modems, ethernet etc. There use to be quite a few
wormholes where one use to pass packets without infringing amateur
licenses. Basically you can either run TCP/IP over radio and internet
links with any kind of routing/rerouting protocol you like. Each point
where there are dual interfaces can also be an intelligent gateway/server.

Apart from political and possibly legal reasons there is no technical
problem with setting up a RF (amateur) link to replace/failover internet
ones. Some care must obviously be exercised in bandwidth requirements.

There is a lot more available on this that is beyond the small scope of
my post.

Linux boxes for example can do this job nowadays. I believe there are
Windows equivalents but havent checked.

Cheers Bob VK2YQA

Paul Rubin wrote:


I'm not sure what WinLink2K is or what its relation to emergency
communication is supposed to be. Is there a url about it?

I've been interested for a while in a packet mode that uses the
internet. An endpoint node wouldn't have to be on the net, but it
would connect to a remote node that also had internet connectivity.
So it would be fine for an emergency at the endpoint. If there was a
catastrophe that took out the whole internet, then it wouldn't work.