Radio Networking

[Matthew J Ghio]

Ed Switalski <E.Switalski at bnr.co.uk> wrote:

>*** Quite Far !
>
>    With coherent CW you can key morse Japan/US i.e cross the Pacific
>    on a few watts.

If so, this might make a very convienient email/chat system... and with
encryption, a great way to hide our anonymous remailer connections from
'Big Brother'.

I must admit I don't know much about radio hardware...  But would it be
possible to link up a large metropolitan area via radio links of this
type and transmit email and such?  I think I could find a lot of sysops
interested in that... no more waiting until night to get netmail!

If the system worked at 300 bps, you could transmit a 2K message in
about one minute.  That would allow over 1000 messages per day, much
less than most small BBS networks, and certainly enough to keep up with
this list.  (Not to mention that ASCII text is very compressable, 50% or
more compression is not difficult in many cases.)

How hard would it be to build a small transmitter/receiver system to
handle data at low bps rates?  And how much would it cost?