Our club owns and maintains a dual-port packet radio NODE and PBBS. The station is set up near Balsam Lake, WI. Power output is set at 45 watts on VHF and 35 watts on UHF. The TNC is a dual-port Kantronics KAM XL and the transceivers are made by Alinco; DR-135 and DR-435
The X-Connect SSID is N9XH-4.
There is also an APRS (N9XH-10) node running on 144.39. The equipment was donated to us by Len N9QIP. The equipment consists of a General Electric commercial transceiver and an MFJ TNC.

KA-NODE:

Equipment:
Alinco DR-135 (45 watts) FM Radio
Alinco DR-435 (35 watts) FM Radio
Kantronics KAM XL
Diamond Cross-Band Coupler
Hustler G6-270 Antenna 170' HAAT

Let's Enjoy This Stuff!
I'd like to preach about a few ways to DO packet as sometimes so much
stuff goes past us in emails, we dont always have a chance to digest  it.
I've heard comments from some that say to me i that i need to try to
explain some stuff. So here goes... There are a few ways to setup a packet station.

One way is to just hook a TNC to a radio and computer with a simple
terminal program such as Hyperterminal, Winpack, Outpost, etc. This works fine if you ONLY use TERMINAL programs on your TNC. IF you want to use Winlink programs WHICH WE WANT YOU TO!!! (RMS Packet,Paclink,Airmail) also, that gets a bit more complicated.

You see, Winlink programs are a different animal. They are fancy high
level programs that, when they are started up on your computer, go into
your TNC and start changing stuff. That is what the .INI files in each
program are for. These programs change your TNC from TERMINAL mode to either KISS mode or HOST mode. Plus, they talk to your email program
in TCP-IP or some such nonsense and allow you to send email over packet. Complete with fonts, attachments, and formatting. Whoah baby!!!

Doing this enables the PROGRAM to do all the thinking and just use your
TNC as a dumb modem. If you just run Winlink programs on your computer, and NOTHING else, you will probably do fine.

Problems happen when you SWITCH between programs. WHY??? Because Winlink programs for some strange reason dont exit pretty. They go in, change your TNC to KISS mode, and then when you exit out of them, they LEAVE the TNC in KISS mode. And you are sad because your TNC wont initialize, and you want to run your TERMINAL program!!! So, to get it back, You either hard reset your TNC, and reenter a bunch of parameters or do some weird tricks i wont describe here.

But what if you want it ALL? You want to run Outpost, Paclink, RMS
Packet, Winpack, ALL at the same time. Enter AGWPE ------AGW Packet engine. What this wonderful program does is allow you to run all of these
programs on ONE TNC. Plus, if you want a program to control more
than 1 TNC, you can do that too, by settting up multiple PORTS on
AGWPE. I use the packet engine on my computer, and run Outpost,
Paclink,Winpack,and RMS Packet.

If i wanted to run a separate radio and TNC, and do APRS on a different
freq., AGW would route those packets also through another AGW port.
Then, I could ALSO have an APRS program like UIVIEW running also. That might just happen soon!

The guy that wrote AGW has written a bunch of companion programs that
are made to work WITH AGWPE: I'm just going to name a few. Go to the AGW site and explore. AGWTERMINAL, AGWMONITOR, and one i just found out about that I REALLY LIKE---AGWUIDIGI.

WHY do i like UIDIGI? Well, two things you lose when you use the packet engine is the ability to have a mailbox and the ability to be a node.
(however, there are now AGW programs that give YOU a mailbox too.. I
prefer Outpost.. but thats just ME ) But AGW UIDIGI gives you the ability to DIGIPEAT. Say D-I-G-I-P-E-A-T. It allows others to use your station to get to others. AND vis versa. Which in our area is a GOOD thing. In an emergency, having redundant digipeaters can mean the difference between having a reliable route or not. If you are a portable station at some shelter or hospital, you want OPTIONS!!!

THATS why I preach redundancy. If we all had 200 foot towers with
Stationmasters on them we could do with less. MAYBE! I cant get to Ed's place by bouncing through WIPOLK all the time. But if i could DIGI through Freds or Johns station, maybe that would do it.

This message is way long, and i have so much more to say. (QUICK, SOMEONE STOP MARK... He's talking about PACKET again...!!!)

Just to whet your appetite, much of packet has moved to APRS. and we havent even BEGUN to explore that. MORE than just vehicle tacking. Quite a mode and because of the extensive network out there, your  little station gets alot of bang for your buck. And then theres IGATES. But  thats for another time. And then theres OUTPOST. My all time favorite packet program.

 Well, this has been fun. Lets enjoy this stuff.

AGW Packet Engine
I  want to share a great program with you. A few more of you are messing with packet and Winlink now, and I want to tell you about the AGW packet engine.

I have fought for years trying to understand the config on this thing, and had people tell me how wonderful it was.To me, it was just a middleware that i didnt feel was user friendly and I didn't understand it's capabilities.This afternoon, Jerry N0MR helped me setup this program on my computer. It was simpler than I thought, and I'm like a kid in a candy store.

When i first started in packet, I didnt see the need for a middleware program. I just hooked my radio to my TNC and did packet. As I found more cool programs that used my TNC, I had to switch between them, using one program at a time, and I found that these programs would change settings in my TNC that I had to reset to use a different packet program. Especially the Winlink programs.

AGW Packet Engine is a program that talks to all your packet/Winlink programs and allows you to run them all at the same time with 1 TNC.  Now, you can have Outpost, a terminal program such as AGWTERM or WINPACK,Paclink, RMS Packet, and others all running at the same time, and AGW sorts out the packets and sends them to wherever they go.  All of these programs have setup instructions for use with the packet engine.

But wait, theres more!  If you talk to John KC9PDJ, he will tell you how he used AGW as a TNC with a simple soundcard interface.  AGW has the ability to be a simple TNC using your computer soundcard.  That means if you'd like to do simple packet and cant afford a TNC, you download AGW(free or $49 shareware Pro version...I'm using the free version), build a $5-10 interface and you just saved the cost of a TNC. I'm investigating if this would work for a simple APRS station.

Check it out. I have disks with all these programs on them, or you can get them online. Some have been making interfaces.  Maybe at a meeting or something, you guys could demo your stuff.