ka2dew's comments

Off the grid text messaging attracts young people into the hobby and retains existing hams, especially the young ones. This is a worthy concept.

The trick is to get a few Raspberry PIs and install the software. The NinoTNCs are really cheap so you can make a network on your desk without any radios. Then get the radios after you can con some couple of other hams within a few miles to play with it with you. It's a kick.

check out a $30 four-speed KISS TNC for $30 called "NinoTNC". Also a ham radio cable manufacturer called hammadeparts.com

Beware that the Baofeng radio has many configurable elements, some of which get in the way of doing packet. Also, the radios are built like crap and can hurt you during operation.

There are used radios like the Kenwood TK760g for not much more than a Baofeng but they do 25watts output. < %70 each. Sometimes down to $30.

Once you decide sending packets from point A to point B is a good idea, one must look at what percentage of the available bandwidth is actually usable.

Many hams think of packet radio in terms of building a single station, for a user-end-terminal, or for a relay, and generally going along with the current in-use frequency for the purpose of getting access to existing other stations.

This turns out to be a bad idea though because channel bandwidth is mostly wasted when participating on the same channel as other disinterested parties to whom you will be interfere, and take interference from. The channel bandwidth actually achieving good result (i.e. message delivery) on a shared channel is pretty minuscule compared to the available bandwidth, because of necessary redundancy, or because of retries, combine with channel time lost to collisions, weak signal, and back-off channel sharing timers.

A much more efficient approach works by having the new station actually consider themselves part of a network, and then creating a cooperative dedicated collision free channel to the next station. This, however, requires considering two stations at a time when "getting on packet". I highly recommend this method as it results in far better channel performance.

NCPACKET.ORG has 35 stations in a well thought out network, and they can run IRC-LIKE 20-way chat sessions which are lively and non-directed, with impunity, and low latency (60 seconds or less from end to end of an 8-hop-wide network).