Timewave PK-232MBX, Руководство по эксплуатации

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PK-232 MBX – OPERATING MANUAL PACKET-RADIO
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4.3.2
What It Means
There are different types of packets that will mean different things to your PK-232. Your
PK-232 keeps track of and knows what to do with all these packets and so the user does
not have to worry about them most of the time. Since the PK-232 has the capability of
"Monitoring" all the Packet activity on a channel we'll briefly discuss the types of packets
you will most often see. Skip to the next section if you do not plan on doing much chan-
nel monitoring.
Let's look at the first packet in the examples above and get acquainted with what it all
means.
N7ALW*>WA7GCI [C]
Every single packet you send will have your callsign (the one you just entered in MYCALL)
as the first callsign of the packet. The callsign after the ">" is the next station the packet
will go to. So the packet listed above originates from N7ALW and is being sent to
WA7GCI.
All packets will have at least these two callsign fields.
The "[C]" immediately following the two callsigns identifies this packet as a CONNECT Re-
quest. So we see that N7ALW is requesting a packet CONNECTION with WA7GCI.
The second packet in the above examples is a response to the first.
WA7GCI*>N7ALW (UA)
In this case we see that WA7GCI is sending to N7ALW by the order of the callsigns. This
packet acknowledges the Connect request as shown by the "(UA)" which stands for Un-
numbered Acknowledge.
One benefit of Packet-Radio is that packets can be relayed or "digipeated" by any station
on the same frequency. In fact, packets can be relayed by up to eight other stations to
get them to a distant station you cannot reach directly. In practice, digipeating through a
large number of stations does not work very well, but still you will often see packets that
are digipeating through one or two stations to get to their destination. The packet shown
below is an example of a digipeated packet.
K6RFK>N7ALW*>N7GMF:
Good night John, its been nice talking to you.
This packet originated from K6RFK and is being sent to N7GMF but is "Digipeated"
through the station N7ALW. We also see that this packet contains data by the text "Good
night John...". Another thing that should be noticed in this packet is the asterisk (*) in the
first line. The asterisk tells which station was actually heard sending the packet. In this
case, we can see that we actually heard radio station N7ALW. Without the asterisk, we
could not tell whether the transmission came from radio station K6RFK or N7ALW. More
will be discussed about digipeating later, but the above example is typical.
The following packet is a data packet from N7ALW to WA7GCI.
N7ALW*>WA7GCI:
Hi Bob, how are you this evening?