Hi Chris WW2BSA,
One thing I do not know much about is the 'traditional' packet hardware, like those TNCs for Pactor and Robust Packet and if there's software reimplementations so they're easily usable / accessible? One issue with packet is indeed the lack of standardization, or ease of identifying non-AX25/AFSK300 modes with 'small' bandwidths. I can't tell PACTOR from Robust Packet, and I don't know what benefits there are to using Robust Packet (which doesn't seem to be decodable by 'basic' packet modems?) with the new regulation changes and upcoming packet modems.
for other modems, ARDOP development has been dead for a few years, and in turn now we have FreeDATA based on Codec2 (sadly software is very alpha and buggy on Windows for me, but is under constant development) as a potential longer-term replacement for direwolf/soundmodem. That's probably another huge amount of work to convince people to try since it's not 'true' packet, so best to keep focus on the most popular HF Packet software that I also first tried a decade ago.
One coordination issue that I also have noticed is the USB(uppersideband) users on our networks. I know some operators like to run on say, 7.1013 USB to hear both standard packet, robust packet (nearby) and VARA packets on the main freq? If we've got a mix of sidebands, the community would need to agree to offsets for LSB and USB set radios for these additional 'channels'.
I suppose my beacon could include '600b @1250cf L & 2150cf U' as a notice that I am running a decoder on that area. I see a decent bit of QRM from wider digital/packet from Vara or Winlink at ~750hz or so on 7.104LSB
