Early Packet Radio in central MN
In 1991 when I got my Ham radio licence the other technical "rage" was Bulletin Board Services (BBS) which operated over phone lines with dial up modems allowing us to read and send messages (think early email) with our computer.
The downside of BBS activity was cost. It was usually long distance to any of the bigger, non local BBS's, so the meter was always running.
On the other hand, I'm sure the phone companies loved it.
After I had gotten my feet wet in amateur radio, mainly in the VHF and UHF FM operations, I discovered Hams also communicated with computer modems over radio channels at whopping speeds of 300 and 1200 baud!
Early on, a group of Hams from Tuscon, AZ designed and sold a modem kit called a Terminal Node Connector 2 (TNC2). It was an instant hit and several companies cloned the design, putting it in range of the typical ham for around $100. The TNC was connected to the computer with a serial cable and to the radio's microphone connection.?
This facet of ham radio took off, primarily because hams also tended to be early adopters of personal computers and love new gadgets.?
Our local college in Willmar had a wireless communication program that was very popular turning out two way radio technicians.
It's instructor, Roger Williams W0WUG(sk) had a packet station at the lab and it was using a 100' tall tower, one of two the school had for training. As a result of it's height and quality installation, it had a wide coverage and many area hams used it to get on packet radio.
About the same time Ham programmers were creating BBS and network software (mostly free) designed for radio use that also included message forwarding and routing routines. BBS programs were computer based while network modems were EPROM replacements for the TNC2 that eliminated the user interface and used intelligent algorithms to route the traffic.
In essence, a network for Packet Radio was evolving before our eyes.?
Hams with high locations, like myself, were able to connect to these packet radio networks at night that were starting to appear in Minneapolis and St Cloud. It made us want more...
One of the local hams, Dick Butler W0RIM(sk), had connections to the St. Cloud Ham club and made the introductions to Hank Koch NF0H(sk), Ed Steinblock K0VU(sk) and Jack Maus W0MBD(sk).?
Hank was already running a BBS, but found the connection to Minneapolis to be very unreliable. We all agreed a designated "backbone" that would move the traffic between us and the metro was needed. The result was a UHF (446 MHz) path extending from the west metro to a 1400' site east of Cold Spring. The Cold Spring site had a line of sight path to the Mpls "node" and a clear north-south path to St Cloud and my QTH on Ringo Lake near Spicer. Frankly, we were very fortunate geography was our friend.
We used cutting edge (at the time) 9600 baud radio modems grafted to network TNCs for greatly increased throughput.?
At the time, the radio transceivers had to be modified to work at 9600 baud, so I turned to Roger W0WUG(sk) and a student of his Joel N0NCO, from Ridgewater Wireless to teach me how.
I might also add another of Roger's former students, Dan Karg WB0GDB, was also active in packet radio and created the 9600 baud connection at the Minneapolis end. This, in turn, connected us to the rest of the packet radio BBS "world".
With a solid connection in place, we had two local access BBSs running on each end for a total of four. Two in St Cloud, one at Ringo Lake and one in Willmar.
About the same time I procured a rent free location at the 150' level on a 500' tower near Spicer. This was a wide area access node running 50W on VHF (145 MHz) and 1200 baud. With it, hams from a 30 mile radius could easily access the two local BBSs as well as other hams on this network. It was called MNSPI and served the packet community until the tower site was sold and we had to vacate around 2000.
One of the earlest users of the Internet were Ham radio packet operators using "wormholes" between universities (where the Internet resided in those days). These wormholes allowed us to virtually appear on a distant network - in our case usually Florida. From there we would connect to and chat with other hams in the Sunshine state like they were local.
Most users "surfed" the local BBS stations reading personal messages, public bulletins and often, posting their own replies. This was almost always 2 meter FM 1k2 baud in order to keep the hardware requirements simple. If you were already operating voice mode, all you needed was a TNC (modem).
Then the Internet happened and this all died off.
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N0QBH Mike Berg