[44net] past and the future

I can echo a lot of what Robbie wrote. My dad was in broadcast radio when I was younger. I read an article by Larry Kollar, KC4WZK on the Amateur Packet Radio Network that was floating around on dial-up BBS's and really caught my attention. That kind of sealed the deal that I needed to get into the hobby. When the locals gave me a copy of NOS, that was great. Before you know it I had two NOS boxes networked using NE2000 drivers. Moved from 1200 to 9600, and drooled when reading the VE3JF higher speed pages. We even did webpages on 9600 baud RF in the mid 90's when we all gravitated to Linux. Lots of learning and fun. Moving forward if you know anyone in the hobby with coding skills there are plenty of things that can be done. Hopefully in the future we can attract a few more of these types when they see the relevance ham radio can offer with higher speed networks and that sort. I am sure Chris could use a hand. How about a openwrt package for hams? Be that out of part 15 frequency control, or something like rip44d http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/devel/packages Then there is always application ideas on 44net. I am impressed with what is out there already. On the RF side the broadband hamnet firmware developers could probably always use a hand too. 73 Steve, KB9MWR