Bob Bruninga wrote:
cultural change for AMSAT. Voice communications would no longer be the primary motivation or justification for a project; it would merely be a nice side-effect.
I believe the number 1 thing we should be working on is "Universal Amateur Radio Text Messaging". The goal is to be able to text message any ham anywhere, anytime using any device using only his call.
I have counted over TWO dozen existing text messaging capabilities in Ham radio and the problem is, that few of them are cross connected or integrated, yet we could do it easily if we just took it on as the big picture!
See www.aprs.org/aprs-messaging.html
APRS has had the above local and global terrestrial and satellite text messaging between mobiles and handhelds for over a decade
Even if we endorse the view of universal messaging APRS should not be the underlying protocol. Rather then bolt something on to an OSI layer 4 (-ish) protocol, lets approach this with no preconceptions and start fresh. Heck, if we want to reuse something, let's tear a page from Cisco's book and implement something that does IP since almost everything except my toaster speaks IP. Anything else relegates our hobby to the digital stone age.
ACP is a good step in the right direction. The fact that it understands that bits are bits and doesn't give a hoot about what's on top of it allows us to get back into relevance again.
</rant>