[anonymousiam]

I haven't done any AX.25 (or KISS) for over 30 years. Is it still a thing, or has the packet radio community moved on to something better? Back when I began, there were no turn-key solutions, so you often needed to modify your radio to get something on the air. This was especially true for 9600 baud FSK setups.

For a while, there was a community of stations creating an infrastructure similar to the dial-up BBS world, including message forwarding (UUCP).

There were even a few Internet gateways for a while. (I ran one of the two that were reachable from my corner of LA.) I imagine they're everywhere today.

(Getting married and raising children can quash a lot of hobbies.)

[wolvoleo]

Here in Europe there's nothing left except APRS which I find boring and incongruous with current developments (I try to avoid sharing my location, not to do it actively). What I miss are the long chats.

What we needed was a faster packet but it stopped at 9600 which is no longer useful for anything these days.

[anonymousiam]

Thank you for the report. I've never had any interest in APRS either. Seems like an Air-tag would be more reliable and less wasteful of spectrum.

I once worked a European station from my station in Los Angeles. It was Halloween sometime around 1990, and I was on 10m (HF) packet. I had used a digipeater in Washington D.C. to have a QSO with G0BOO. It was memorable mostly because of the remote station's callsign and the fact that it was Halloween.

[colanderman]

I am just getting into the packet scene in the Boston area.

APRS aside, as far as I've found, there are about a half dozen Winlink nodes in the area and one BBS. And one lovely node in Cambridge (KZ2X-1 [1]) which provides connectivity to a bevy of ancient (though virtualized) OSes.

I don't know how much AMPRnet activity there is. There are only 7 allocations in the area (mine included). I'd love to be able to e.g. log in to my home network from a few radio hops away but I don't think there's any infrastructure in place for that (such as Mobile IP).

[1] https://kz2x.radio/posts/complex/

[BobbyTables2]

I also wonder about the state of packet radio.

When I had time, I had no money for equipment. Now that I have money and knowledge, no time…

[iamnothere]

It’s still a thing, although I think VARA is more popular right now. IMHO the weak signal modes are getting more use because many newer hobbyists don’t have the money or space for high powered setups.

There are even people building BBS like functionality onto JS8Call.