You are correct on the speed issue... Until we can megabit+ speeds that are
easy enough for the appliance operators to use, we will likely see little
growth.

But as you point out, there has been little development or growth in the
past 20 or so years... The interest was gone long before the "typical" ham
was an appliance operator. It seems to me that, in about the same time
frame, perhaps +5 years, there was a rather vocal minority that were
anti-digital that drove many folks away from the modes, people who had the
knowledge and skills to make high speed systems work...

In about 1989 there was a local ham (now SK named Frank whose last name and
call I can not remember now) who came to me with a design for a device that
would plug into a 100BaseT NIC and generate low power (about 50 mW as I
recall) at either 70 cm or 23 cm. He wanted my input on the protocol stack
(networking is my thing). Effectively, the device simply sent and received
TCP/IP over an RF Ethernet link. He had built a pair of prototypes that
worked very well. He then built a simple amplifier to get the RF up to about
10 watts and it worked very well between his house and mine, about 8 miles
apart, on J-Poles. We were able to get about 80 Mbps at 23 cm.

He was then attacked by a few of the vocal minority fussing about their
opinion that anything faster than 56 Kbps was not for "real hams" and he
scraped the project rather than put up with heat from these folks.

I wish that I still had the schematic for the prototype that he gave me, but
over the course 15+ years and 3 cross-country moves, I have misplaced them.
It would need significant updating... The prototypes were xtal controlled
and did not use SS. I would think (I am a network engineer, not RF or
electronics!) that the system could benefit from DDS, DSP, and SS
procedures.

I suspect that a team of RF, electronics, and network experts could probably
reproduce the device, given the motivation and if left alone by (or were to
simply ignore) the doom-sayers. And, I would wager, that the team could come
up with improvements that would let get even closer to 100 Mbps, if not
faster, when used on a 1000BaseT NIC.

I further suspect that if such a device could be designed, built, tested,
and then given to one (or more) of the several manufacturers that they would
sell like hotcakes, again assuming that something could be done about the
doom-sayers.

Take Care & 73
--
From The Desk Of
Marty Albert, KC6UFM


"Jayson Davis" wrote in message
...
Marty Albert wrote:

I am curious as to what people attribute the (apparent) death of digital
systems overall.

I, of course, have my own ideas that have, by the way, not changed for
more
than a decade.

So, what say you about the life of digital services?

The death of the digital modes is directly attributible to the fact that
the protocol is 20 years old and has throughput equal to the speed of an
old lady sitting in a motorized wheelchair trying to check-out her
groceries in the express isle.

TAPR had a great spread-spectrum board, but the project died a death due
to a thousand cuts of various sorts. Until amateur radio gets a similar
project that makes speeds 384 kbps and in a form that makes it easy
for appliance operators to plug-n-play, packet is all we have.

I'm surprised the ARRL hasn't sponsored a project. Kids playing with
802.11 are having far more success in building networks that amateur
radio operators.