OVERVIEW OF SOFTWARE FOR DIGITAL HAM RADIO

Where to download free software: (often there are helpful help files also, so you might want to peruse around a bit more than just download)

Malware Detection Software: Many commercial virus checkers and malware detectors will consider very rare software to be automatically suspect, and delete or refuse to run or load it. You will have to find out how to tell your malware detection software to accept these quite-respectable programs. Every malware detection program works differently, so read your instructions!

Digital Ham Radio has many facets. Characters from a computer become some version of “tones” going to a transmitter microphone input; audio from a receiver speaker output gets transformed into characters in a computer and possibly visible on the screen to a user. Software & hardware combine to make this magic happen. This paper will attempt to categorize the major software required to accomplish several communications.

How It Started

The original hardware/software solution was a “TNC” with both hardware and software inside. Kantronics KPC-3 is a common one, the PK232 another. These devices had two modes:

COMMAND mode: allowed users to make “connections” to other radios and other functions

CONVERSE mode: “connected” TNC's entered CONVERSE mode where everything typed went out and was transferred error-free via handshaking between stations. This could be used for “chat” and hence I informally call it “keyboard to keyboard”. Control-C would allow users to drop back to COMMAND mode. Enthusiasts built simple email systems called BBS (bulletin board system), did CHATs together, etc. This sort of died down after cell phones / smartphones eclipsed their applications.

WINLINK

Along came further computerization of the process and automated programs like WINLINK EXPRESS would manipulate the TNC on their own (once directed by a mouse click) to both make a CONNECTION, exchange passwords, negotiate email and attachment transfer, perform transfers in either direction, and automatically disconnect from the station once completed. Such software is fairly single-purposed; you can't typically use it for simple chats. People without cell phone /smartphone access (sea-goers, wilderness explorers, and EMERGENCY COMMS PEOPLE) found this very useful.

KISS

Then a new kind of hardware interface came along named “KISS” (for Keep It Simple....) with much less software in the interface, which made sense because the personal computers were more and more powerful and more able to do more of the software processing. The PC software might be single purposed as well and strictly control the process, keeping the user divorced from the keyboard-to-keyboard CONVERSE mode. WINLINK provided interfaces to this new interface.

SOUNDCARDS

Even further flexibility (and complexity) arrived when simple soundcard-based systems were wrapped with a bit of software (e.g., AGWPE & UZ7HO Soundmodem.exe forWindows, Direwolf for Linux) to emulate a KISS TNC...

VHF VERSUS HF

VHF and HF users further had a different digital experience. HF users can make very long distance contacts easily (at times) and need no repeaters, but have horrible problems with static and interference that dramatically reduce throughput, have only limited bandwidth, and generally find error-corrected CONNECTED modes to be unusable. HF users typically use un-connected “broadcast” modes which don't even form their transmissions into Packets (like AX.25 packets) --- they usually use modes like PSK31 or RTTY which simply take characters and spit them out as tones over the air. Everything is simply “broadcast” and anyone can listen. WINLINK is an exception -- using single-purpose software and specially chosen modes such as WINMOR, connected, packetized, error corrected and automated connections are accomplished routinely to transfer EMAIL (not keyboard-to-keyboard) using a soundcard interface, or PACTOR doing the same thing with much more of the smarts in an expensive specially designed modem.

Useful reference: http://www.soundcardpacket.org/8tncmodes.aspx

HF Experience

VHF Experience

Review of particulars on the software

Download BPQ for Windows from: http://www.cantab.net/users/john.wiseman/Downloads/LastestInstaller/