[FADCA] Anyone want to take exception to this?

[Chuck Hast]

On 7/11/05, David Calder <n4zkf at n4zkf.com> wrote:
> Just goes to show not everyone is in love with Winlink.

There are probably a lot of people who are not in particularly in love with
it, it runs on a single OS platform, one that is so prone to external
contamination
that it is not allowed in certain environments, but it is all over the place in
almost every ones home.

That said it allows you to walk into a shelter or other place where you need
to handle traffic, ask who knows how to handle e-mail, get a show of hands
conscript them and put them to work sending e-mail for the shelter. That is
not so easy to do when you are using the amateur radio BBs format. Most
of those people that stuck up their hand and offered to do e-mail would just
turn around and walk off if you tried to get them to do bbs-mail.

Therein lies the strength of it, in a disaster there are not enough licensed
hams to go around, we have been too busy fighting over 30 to 90 year old
technologies instead of keeping up with the times so now we are needed
to handle traffic and do other disaster work and we can not do it, well we
do second best install some gear that lets non-hams generate the traffic
and a ham watch over the whole mess even though they may be remote
from the site. Anyone can do e-mail and indeed most will do it without 
question, but you try to get them to do something that they are not familiar
with and it gets messy real fast. Believe me I have been there done it and
got the tee-shirt with the bullet holes, I even set the stuff up to where they
only had to enter 3 destination addresses but it was a real big issue to get
people to do it because it was "strange" to them. 

If we had a interface that would take e-mail and translate it to the BBS for-
mat then gather and forward it to the BBS you would have a solution that
would allow you to do what WinLink does, at this point I have not seen one
that is still not complicated if not strange to use. WinLink will use a regular
mailer and do the job just as the disaster people need it to do. That is why
it is popular.

There are many of them that would rather have someone setting on a mic
sending that stuff with all of the error prone issues of relaying messages
over voice links, and just can not see the light to going that route, then you
have the ones who want to do 'keyboard' only, and messages of sizes no
larger than a certain size. They have got the ear of a certain part of the
people involved in this, but your BBS is not welcome there either so it is a
double whammy. You make use of what will make the disaster people 
interested, and is simple to use, and at the same time you can introduce
the other bits and pieces as important sources of data or other methods to
move traffic. Back on the BBS issue, Brian Lantz of TNOS fame tried to do
a mailer interface on TNOS that would do exactly that, preserve the BBS
addressing and at the same time provide a simple e-mailer interface but
I think it was met with a certain level of coolness that implied that there was
not much interest in it so he did not persue it. Sort of a damned if you do
damned if you don't.

-- 
Chuck Hast 
To paraphrase my flight instructor;
"the only dumb question is the one you DID NOT ask resulting in my going
out and having to identify your bits and pieces in the midst of torn
and twisted metal."