I’m rolling like we did it back in the 80’s. At the Boulder Amateur Radio Club BARCFest last weekend I found a later model AEA PK232MBX Terminal Node Controller (TNC) for twenty bucks.
For those of us who are wondering what the hell a TNC is and what it does, let me tell you a little story.
Way back in the day before Angry Birds and Instagraph, powerful computers were large, noisy, expensive machines that lived in air conditioned basements under large brick buildings. The kind of computers that a Ham could afford would have had kilobytes ( yes, KILObytes ) of RAM and maybe the only storage medium available was to a standard audio cassette tape. To say the least, their capability was limited.
However, communications over a serial port was one thing that nearly every home computer of the late 70’s to 80’s could do. Even the tiny Timex Sinclair 2048 could manage this feat.
This is were to the TNC steps in. A TNC is essentially a small computer running bulletin board / mail box software. On the local side it is connected via serial cable to the home computer, the remote side is connected to the audio jack of your amateur radio. The radio side of the house is generally referred to as “packet radio” or “packet bbs”.
This, kiddos, is how we rocked it back in the day. 1200 bits per second of pure text hotness (actual speeds were really in the low 100’s of bits/sec).
Replace the ham radio and TNC with a modem and telephone line and you have computer BBS’s. Replace the single BBS with the internet and you have Dialup. Replace the modem and telephone with dedicated internet and you have broadband internet.
Now get off my lawn. 73
TARPN has a recipe for building long distance networks of packet stations using VHF and UHF. TARPN is attempting to do packet radio without Internet connectivity. 1200 baud works well for multi-station real-time texting (like IRC), and email delivery, if we remove collisions and transmission delays.