Hams Gain in Remodeled Army MARS

Check the prices from USA Distributer, Farralon Electronics.
You can now purchase the Dragon 7400 version for P4, for $1498.00 list.

 

What needs to happen is further development of WINMOR software, which replaces all that expensive dedicated proprietary hardware of the TNC's with a much much more powerful soundcard and processor of the computer.

The soundcard ADA chips, and the CPU in your average computer is 100x more powerful than what is inside any TNC.


But from what I can tell, the idea that you can use a free software + a cheap ole sound card interface to pretty much replace those boxes, totally SCARES the pants off the guys who spent $2,000 on their fancy TNC's that their money will be wasted and they will be stuck holding a $2k paperweight.

WINMOR already approches Packtor3 speeds and its 100% FREE and only requires the same hardware as PSK31 to use.

http://www.winlink.org/WINMOR


Given some effort of the community we could end this domination by expensive proprietary patent encumbered technologies in HF Packet.

 

What would even be better would be the development of "Openmor" which would move the Winmor program out for cross platform use to Linux and Mac as well as Windows. I'm not sure if that project is still moving forward.

But, the one to one ARQ protocols aren't the only answer out there. And I'm not a big fan of using email for emergency communications, as is the case with the WL2K and Winmor IGATE models. I could imagine a major emergency situation, where tens, if not hundreds, of ops where all lining up to log into an unmanned robot IGATE, thinking that their traffic is the most important. It seems to be a recipe for a major cluster. But, there are certainly situations where radio to email and email to radio can be of great value.

NBEMS focuses almost entirely on manned operations, where you have a net control directing the traffic. NBEMS also offers the advantage of sending broadcast situation reports and bulletins with a single transmission to an unlimited number of receiving stations that all have the ability to individually and automatically confirm or deny 100% receipt of the message (and request a resend if deemed necessary).

I think the combination of PACTOR/WL2k, Winmor IGATES and NBEMS, rather than only one of these choices, is our best solution.

Keep your eyes on the development of NBEMS. There are new high speed experimental modes and protocols in alpha testing right now which are performing extremely well. I would expect some new major releases from the w1hkj dot com site in the next month or so.

-Dave, KB3FXI
paNBEMS