Ham IP addresses?

[louie]

There was a wormhole in the sky that I was involved with back around 1987.

I was working at the University of Maryland Computer Science Center in 
College Park at the time, on the staff at the computer center there.  We 
had a couple of satellite antennas on the roof that we used for various 
purposes.  One of them was otherwise "idle" as the project in question 
has come to a merciful end.

Now this satellite dish and feed, etc. were still up on the roof. It was 
a pretty good size, maybe around 3 or 4 meters?  It was relatively 
expensive and painful to get installed, both because of the weight of 
the structure, as well as needing to run conduits for the signal runs as 
well as non-trivial power to run heaters for the feed and dish so that 
the link would continue to operate during snow storms.  While there was 
money to install it, there was no obvious money at hand to remove it, 
and I think we were all hoping to leverage it as part of some future 
project or grant..

There was a ham at the company that ran the actualy satellite operations 
for this link.  I wish I can recall who it was at Vitalink in the SF bar 
area, but I can't at this point.  We managed to hook up somehow, and he 
had the idea to set up an AX.25 packet radio wormhole.  It was done in a 
fairly interesting way, at least given what was available at the time.  
He shipped out some hardware that produced the ability to transmit audio 
over the data link.  I think the capacity of the full-duplex data 
circuit was 19.2-50 kb/s; and he had some hardware with a (as I recall) 
CVSD audio code.  We installed a 2m antenna on the roof of the building 
in a quasi-official manner and scraped up 2m radio and TNC.   Likewise, 
a similar configuration at the far end.  We ended up sending audio from 
each end to the other with the effect of having this crazy digipeater.  
It suffered a bit from a hidden terminal problem, since local 
transmitters on 2m in the MD/DC end couldn't hear the audio being 
received from california, and vice-versa.  But it worked after a fashion.

It was up and running for some number of months, maybe a year or so, 
using WA3YMH-1 (or some other suffix) as the callsign of the 
digipeater.  I'm sure it was all perfectly legal, and I'm pretty hopeful 
any statute of limitations has since expired, if not :-)

There's an article here: 
http://ncpa.n0ary.org/13_Downlink_1994_summer.pdf starting about page 
13, describing that experiment, including the later conversion of the 
audio bridging to using the link  between two NET/ROM nodes, one at each 
end.  As I recall, we just shoved the 9600 bgp async serial data into 
the 56k synchronous satellite modems and there were enough samples per 
bit to get the async characters shoved over to the other end!

I also recall random flame wars at the time about the impurity of 
tunneling amateur packet radio over non-amateur radio facilities, 
because, you know, that's just wrong.  Like phone patches are all 
different.  Like we do with many ARISS contacts these days.  Oh well.

I don't know if any AMPR IP traffic ever got shoved over this. Around 
the same time, early KA9Q NET or NOS code has the ability to tunnel over 
the Internet, so maybe that was going on at the same time?

louie
wa3ymh


On 01/13/2014 01:25 PM, Mike O'Dell wrote:
> i admit to tossing a softball at RS
> to elicit his response. (grin)
> it is a very concise summary of messiness
> which others have spent many pages failing
> to explain.
>
> Louie can probably fill in details (or correct
> blatant errors), but I believe Net 44 came about
> when Mills did The Great Wormhole
> In The Sky experiment. and it's easy to believe
> Kantor was complicit. Dave Mills was historically
> prolific in gluing "novel" infrastructure onto
> the experimental IP/TCP network to prove by
> demonstration what could be achieved. This
> was the genesis of the IP-enabled FAX machines
> and the link between the DC area and the San Diego
> area over satellite that also carried net-44 traffic
> for a while.
>
> And with that, my personal Wayback Machine is geezed-out.
>
>      -mo
>
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