Packet Radio How To Work It (Not How It Works)

But How Do You Make a Contact?

It was 1985. I was just getting started in packet radio and I was getting very frustrated. I’d hooked up my TNC (terminal node controller) as directed but was having only marginal success decoding messages and none at all in making contacts. Then my November CQ arrived, proclaiming on the cover, “RTTY Special*” with “*Including Packet Radio” at the bottom of the page.

“Great!” I thought. “Help has arrived!”

But alas, it was just one more article on how packet worked. I needed to know how to work it. So I called Publisher Dick Ross, K2MGA, with whom I’d been working on a project as then-chairman of the ARRL Public Relations Committee, expressed my disappointment and asked, “Why don’t you have something on how to work it?” His answer: “Because you haven’t written it yet.” “But I clearly don’t know enough about it,” I responded. “How can I write about it?” “You find out and tell the rest of us,” Dick replied.

The result was the two-part article reproduced below, in the June and July 1986, issues of CQ, the first tutorial in any ham magazine on how to properly set up your packet station to make successful contacts, how to use digipeaters (digital repeaters), and packet bulletin board systems. CQ continued to lead the way on packet, culminating in the launch of the “Packet User’s Notebook” column by Buck Rogers, K4ABT, in the May 1988 issue. These articles have also been the cornerstone of my editorial philosophy for CQ that knowing how to work something is just as important as knowing how it works. – W2VU

So the packet bug has bitten you—or maybe it’s just nibbling at your ankle and you want to find out more about this new facet of amateur radio. You’ve read magazine articles and learned all about the technology, but most of the authors seem so awed by the technology that they forget to tell you what to do once you get on the air. This article will be different. It’s all about packet operating—how to work it instead of how it works.

In keeping with tradition, though, I’ll start with a brief, simple technical explanation. (I promise: no more than two paragraphs, and it won’t get complicated.)

Packet radio is a fancy form of radiotele-type (RTTY). It requires a personal computer or other terminal with an RS-232 output, a packet control unit (called a TNC, or Terminal Node Controller; if you want to find out what that means, find a technical article) and an amateur transceiver. The TNC plugs in between the terminal (computer) and the transceiver (radio). A disc drive and a printer are helpful, though not essential.

Packet radio gets its name from the fact that each transmission consists of a “packet” of data including the callsigns of the originating station, the destination station, and any relay stations in between. It also contains the information you’re sending, plus some computerese (which you never see on your screen) to let your TNC know if it has received the packet correctly.

A couple of other basic definitions:

Digipeater: A digital repeater, used for relaying packet signals. Similar in function to a voice repeater, but with a twist: It doesn’t receive and transmit simultaneously, and it doesn’t operate split frequency.

A packet repeater, operating simplex, “stores and forwards” However, the term usually applies to those stations used exclusively as packet repeaters.