[FADCA] Link east out of Arcadia

[Chuck Hast]

On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 07:04:43 -0500, Bill Sinbine <n4xeo at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> At 12:33 AM 11/11/2004, you wrote:
> >Will we have that link up and running? Seems we have a pretty stable
> >link from Tampa to Arcadia, at times it goes through SRQ and other times
> >it is direct, but it is there in one form or another.
> 
> Chuck can you see the Lake Placid switch from Arcadia? I don't know if they
> got back on line yet.
> I know that we have a bad radio at Okeechobee and that is going to be
> replaced.
> 
> 
> >Also notice that there are only reports of activity on the network links at
> >both Arcadia and SRQ, are the user ports down or just no users at all?
> 
> I would venture to say there are no users!!! That is a shame.
> 
> 
> >Would think we would see at least some sort of activity on the user
> >channels at one site at least.
> 
> Go figure...
> 


By the way, I am using my FPAC Liinux switch to set here and check these
heard list. I have set up commands in the command list that allow me to just
use a 3 char command, example, at the fpac command prompt I type
'tpa' and it sets up a connection to the kc5qcn node app on the switch
down town. If I type ARC I get the one at the 863410 switch in Arcadia
ARC1 gets me the 863494 switch. SRQ gets me that one. BBS gets me
the w4min bbs, it is so flexible that it really makes it fun to see what stuff
you can stick on one of these things.

Also if you select 6pack rather than kiss as the protocol and stick 6pack
eproms in your TNC's you will see a really large increase in throughput
and decrease in retries, 6pack handles the path much more efficiently
and avoids the issues that KISS has with being so dumb and not being
able to tell the controlling computer when to stop/start timers. Example
if you have a busy channel your retry timer should stop while the channel
is busy, then start as soon as it goes clear, but since KISS does not
send any of that data to the computer the computer will just retry when
the timers time out, and many times you will see that the data has
been sent or the ack was received but it was too late to stop the retry,
with 6pack this is all controlled by the tnc, and it tells the computer
what is taking place on the channel so there will not be so much
problems with timing. Since we have never really seen anything
but KISS we really never noticied it, but when you move things to
6pack you WILL notice it, to the point that when the two devices
on each end are timed right the channel will be full most of the time
with small slots for other devices to jump in, but at 9k6 they are not
very wide if you have fast radios.

I would advise you to start reading the ax25-how-to, use the sept
2001 version. For what we are doing all you really want to set up
is the AX25 stuff, and perhaps a netrot node. (for funnies) FPAC
will set up the rest. The fpac325 files does not come with binaries,
so I just ran the floppy, when it had loaded I umounted it and put
in a new floppy, mounted it (mount it as vfat so you can copy the
long file names) I did a cp -R on the /sbin directory and the same
for the /ect directory. Then I moved the floppy over to my linux
fpac machine and copied all but the following files to the /usr/sbin
directory, those I did not copy were:
the bzip files and the fpac.sh file.

I used the fpac.sh file that came in the fpac325 file. That got me up
to fpac325. Works really nice, I am going to put it on a outisde antenna
and start beating on it RF wise. I will also put it on the outside network
and you can ssh into it and try out the interface and just play around
wth it a bit.

Once we get one set up on that side of the state we can use the internet
piece to clear up the path issue, as paths come up we make the wire
side secondary to the rf side.