Sending this on AMSAT because we are looking for Packet Radio sites along the East Coast mountains.

SAVE your KPC9612’s boys, the East will RISE AGAIN!

The Golden Packet team is toying with the idea of making our annual (July 16 th) Appalachian mountain digipeater string from Maine to Georgia permament and making it a 9600 baud network for emergency and ham radio disaster response and play. We already have 4 of the 14 sites with permanent ham access …

So, since we have already shown for 6 years now, that this long 2000 mile linear chain of mountains and valleys can support a 2000 mile network with only 14 digis, why not establish a long haul 9600 baud Node chain from Maine to Georgia which could be a significant boost to Packet radio emergency operations. The network would not operate as APRS digipeaters but as KAnodes. As we all knew back in the 1990’s link-by-link acknowledgment was vastly superior to end-to-end.

We already have three sites in MD, and PA … But we need more than hikers, to get us access to some existing ham radio maintained sites. We do NOT want nodes to branch off down into the plains. These nodes would bog down the network. No, the main backbone would be to support emergency operations with beams that can point up to the mountains to pass traffic.

So, we are splashing this onto AMSAT to see if people have SITE access and/or have unused 9600 baud KPC-9612’s to step up and lets see what we got. Also will need a freq. I’m thinking 145.01 but every time I think of it, people give feedback, and I LOSE or forget the feedback as to what existing systems are already on 145.01, such as DX clusters, etc…

Every day we get MORE AND MORE addicted to our wireless infrastructure, which we all know, will be hard to access in a real emergency. We need to keep the Ham radio Plan-B alive…

Bob, WB4APR