Huntsville Hamfest 2012

Come to the Huntsville Hamfest .!.!.!. (Aug 18 & 19, 2012)

Come talk to me about “stuff” …..

Thanks  /;^)

Why JNOS ??

Anyone who knows me, or has read much of my blog – recognizes I have a lingering interest in an old-school method of providing basic text-messaging.
In today’s world of instant Internet and SMS at our fingertips, it is still easy for me to remember when that was a fantasy. We felt rather state-of-the-art when we could boast of inter-continental email via satellite gateways in the late 1980s, way before most folks had even heard of the Internet. And all this was via RF, and amateur radio operators who had a vision and a passion for providing such a service well before the “When All Else Fails” phrase was coined…

To me, this simple infrastructure is

JNOS – 15 years later

Long ago, in what now seems like a primitive world – I was introduced to a ‘new way’ to do packet radio. Like other pre-Internet computer connections, packet radio was based upon point-to-point links, and we used a local Bulletin-Board System (BBS) to exchange messages. Sometimes we could connect a local BBS to other distant BBSs via mountaintop digipeaters. This was the ham radio version of the dial-up BBS network that was common in the 80s. In 1990 AMSAT launched 4 MicroSats that carried packet radio store-and-forward technology to even further extend this reach, and many of us enjoyed a global electronic messaging service before most folks had even heard of the Internet. This ‘new way‘ to use packet radio utilized tcp/ip – which became the standards in use today as The Internet.

Command Prompt from BBS

So, in 1990 – just after I had moved to Kingsport, TN – my ham radio guru Gary – K4VZZ, introduced me to