RadioBanter - N9OGL...Another RRAP Engineering Hero..?!?! Move Over Lennie!

Oh, many of us WANT change...but not at the expense of the -RADIO-
portion of the hobby. Internet =! Radio. That fact has been pointed out

numerous times by those who design, maintain and operate the existing
packet radio network

The internet is there so use it. Let me tell you a story and this is
the truth. In Taylorville there is three repeaters, One owned by the
local club, one owned by N9FU and one owned by me. Out of all three
repeaters the one that gets the most use by people is mine. The reason,
IT'S HOOKED UP TO THE INTERNET. without that internet connect that
repeater would be just as dead as the others. NO ONE, and believe me
there's a lot of people who use our system (within one month we had
over 400 people connected to our system, that's not counting people
reconnecting....we have the logs to prove it) and not one of those
people bitched and complained about how the internet and radio
shouldn't interact. instead, the praised the idea. The people who bitch
about the internet and radio should interact is either 1. Are too old
of an traditionalist and think they shouldn't interact or 2. Don't
understand it, thus fear it and tries to discourage others from doing
it. (most of both groups are IMHO are on QRZ)

Do amateur radio operators need a high-speed packet-radio
infrastructure? Probably. Moreover, one can be built to exclusively
utilize RF as its transport mechanism; the Internet need not enter into

the picture whatsoever.

true, as a matter of fact the system I'm purposing would have both
internet and RF high speed systems....I set te system up into Phases
(which I call Layers..The part you read on my site was part of Layer
01)

Once it's built and in place, the question arises: What to do with this

network? 10MBPS or higher would give excellent throughput for
high-volume traffic forwarding...which is about all you're going to be
able to -legally- do with it. (See previous remarks copyrighted
software, et al. The sentiment of most SysOps involved will be: It
ain't passing through my station. Period. ANY file other than
plaintext, that is...and rightly so.)

First off, as a copyright holder, which I am; I would like to point out
that there is some materials that are in one of the following
catagories. 1. FREEWA Software that is free to disturbute. 2. FAIR
USE: which is a small portion of a copyrighted material for comment,
educational, critizing, and parody. 3. Public Domain: works that are no
longer copyrighted (currently anything from 1922 on back is in public
domain) Public Domain are also works the the creator has put into
public domain, either by the own admission or by failing to renew their
copyrights (for example the audio from a Greatful Dead concert is in
Public Domain and may be distributed as long as that person is making
money. The 1968 cult classic Night of the Living Dead is in Public
Domain and may be distributed) ALL three catagorize above can be used
on the system without the copyright owners permission. But the whole
Idea is to make a user friendly system instead of typing ALL that crap
like you have to in the BBS systems. Instead it would use a windows
based system, the software would automatically connect you to the
system (I would like to out at this time BBS could be set up the same
way, without internet connection) and instead of typing LL 20 or L @USA
you have a search box and type in what exactly what you looking for. It
time to move away from this text based crap and move into the 21
century.

Again - how will you control access to this system? There's also the
matter of network security - put such a "node" on the Internet and I
guarantee that it will be hacked as soon a vulnerability with the
system is found.

Just Like echolink does...when a ham first signs up and tries to
connect to the nodes. The system will search the FCC database to make
sure the callsign is vaild. As for "Hacker" yes, there could be some
however the odds of a hacker trying to hack into it is off the scale.
Echolink uses nodes on the internet and have not, to my knowledge
anyway has ever been hacked. Not only would hackers be in trouble with
the FCC but there are some tough hacker laws out now so they would be
facing two charges.

Would you filter based on size alone? Actual content (type) of the
files? MD5 hash? I (and every other comptuer-savvy individual on the
planet) can easily bypass any of these schemes by manipulating the
files in certain ways...if the filtering is done via database, it would

be enormous and a true PITA to keep up to date. Thus, it would be
dropped in short order.

It would be based on size. A normal text file can be anywhere from 1K
to 1M , while Music in a MP3 format is 2 to 3 MB, Movies run between
200 to 700 MB (depending on their format MEG, AVI, ect, ect.) The
system I'm purposing is document system either a TXT, RTF, PDF, and all
the other text formats. the idea is to create a virtual library which
ham can exchange idea's and read and explore new idea (except those in
4 land....they can't read)

Looking at the whole proposal from a great height, it closely resembles

the existing AirMail/SailMail PACTOR systems...which operate under an
entirely different set of rules and regulations than does amateur
radio.

I've never heard of them......I do know amateurs are not restricted on
what they can experiment in.

Todd N9OGL