Cheap (but good...) 9600 baud packet radio

Packet radio is stuck. 18 years after the developers of the TNC-1 said that 1200 baud was only temporary, and that packet radio needed much higher speed to be truly useful, the vast majority of packet operations are still at 1200 baud. A few folks have done work at higher speeds, but for various reasons those efforts have never made it to the mass market.

Amateur radio use of TCP/IP is also stuck. While TCP/IP has become the most widely used data protocol in the world -- if you're on the Internet, you use TCP/IP -- its use in ham packet networks has been stagnant or worse over the last several years.

If you're interested, I've put together some thoughts about Why we are stuck at 1200 baud. This paper is still very much a work in progress.

These pages document a project that ties together some bits of technology, some admittedly ancient and some newer, to move packet radio into a new model, with a new user interface. The idea is to provide users with a low cost, easy to configure 9600 baud packet radio system that enables an amateur radio version of the Web, using standard Windows-based tools like web browsers and email clients.

The building blocks are: