Other Packet
Q: I started reading about the TARPN project and I want to know if I can use the TARPN project to join the existing packet in my area.
A: Without knowing more, the answer is probably not. You really should start a TARPN though and see if hams would join you in this.
Packet radio is like USB in that just knowing that it is packet doesn’t really give you a clue as to what is going on.
What is USB doing?
Is it a mouse?
Or a printer?
Or hard disk?
Packet radio is a solution which is applied to solve problems.
Once upon a time when things were primitive, you got the one TNC device which could do packet radio, attached it to your 2m radio, and then you could have manually initiated contacts with others of these TNCs.
As the applications of packet radio have matured, the fact of the TNC has become less important than the actual application.
Along with the fact that it uses packet radio, there are other important criteria which have to be looked at to know how well and how fast and how often things are working, as well as how channels are managed, what bandwidth is used, how the radio equipment is selected and what TNC-ish items are involved.
TARPN is itself an evolving idea.
The basis of TARPN was to take a bunch of raspberry PIs, run software which made the Raspberry PI a radio/packet switch, establish dedicated radio to radio links between them, and then run applications on the Raspberry PI which took advantage of the network of Raspberry PIs.
What happened next is that one application became so seriously popular that the rest are almost not worth mentioning.
So if you have a TARPN, i.e. a bunch of Raspberry PIs and radio links between them, you can almost point to the user interface and say…”TARPN”.
That particular application is real-time chat. It sort of looks like IRC Internet Relay Chat, if you are familiar with that. It works like it too.
What exists in most of the world is one of several other applications for packet radio.
The TARPN concept fails in a couple of human relationship kinds of ways in that you really have to have a bunch of people sold on the idea before it gets worth looking at.
What good is a chat station if you are the only one. It kind of feels like being in the middle of a forest with a Indi500 car.
Most of the packet radio applications that exist are not ham-radio networks.
They are almost all last-mile-to-the-Internet.
The only except outside of TARPN are systems maintained by emergency operations coordinators, like FEMA, RACES, ARES.
Generally, those operators are not enchanted by hams showing up who want to expand their systems.
I would love it for you to start up a TARPN where you are.
