[Elecraft] TNC of choice

[Brendan Minish]

Hello Band,

If you are seriously interested in doing pactor to make use of the Winlink 
system, SCS controllers are the only decent choice and if you are going to 
make much use of the system it is well worth the extra money to get the 
professional firmware (which allows pactor3)

Pactor, when correctly implemented (something other controllers have not 
always done, leaving out memory ARQ for example) is an outstanding mode 
both for throughput under good conditions and robustness under poor 
conditions. Pactor2 is significantly faster and far more robust than 
pactor1,  pactor3 offers the robustness of pactor2 but at up to 5 times the 
throughput by using a full 2.3 Khz instead of 500 hz

In 2001 I did the support comms for the Irish North west passage expedition
http://www.northabout.com/index.htm
At the time pactor 2  was the highest available level, it proved 
outstandingly reliable on the difficult polar path between Ireland and the 
boat, I regularly sent ice charts directly from Ireland to the boat using 
pactor 2, even on days when radio conditions were so poor due to aurora 
that the local (to the boat) HF fax transmissions were illegible.
Northabout also made extensive use of the WL2K system

This summer the boat is returning to Ireland via the north east passage and 
I expect pactor 2 & 3 to prove equally useful
http://www.northabout.com

The SCS controllers also do other data modes, for example my PTC2e also 
does Amtor, RTTY, navetx, HF fax (with appropriate software), PSK31, packet 
(300, 1200 and 9600 Bd ) and CW. For all modes except HF FAX all that is 
needed is a dumb terminal .

If anyone on this list is tooled up for pactor and fancys a keyboard chat 
sometime just drop me a line, pactor is an excellent QSO mode

73
Brendan EI6IZ

At 19:27 14/03/2004, Bandspread wrote:

>Fellow Builders,
>
>I've been off of the digital HF modes for many years. Sold all that stuff a
>long time ago!
>
>Now, well, it's time to do it again.
>
>Given a K2 and a laptop with Win98, what is the TNC of choice these days?
>I'd like to do RTTY, Pactor, etc, And I'd like to connect to Winlink (which
>I believe uses Pactor).
>
>Comments will be appreciated.
>
>Many thanks,
>
>Band

-- 
Brendan Minish
   bminish@minish.org
PGP key available from key servers  wwwkeys.pgp.net