Tarpn: Terrestrial Amateur Radio Packet Network
tarpn.net
tarpn.net
Does anything like that exist?
Beware that the Baofeng radio has many configurable elements, some of which get in the way of doing packet. Also, the radios are built like crap and can hurt you during operation.
There are used radios like the Kenwood TK760g for not much more than a Baofeng but they do 25watts output. < %70 each. Sometimes down to $30.
However, coax and antenna can easily exceed 100 alone.
Any radio amateurs here? What do you actually end up doing with your setups? Do you have conversations with other amateurs or something else?
If it wasn’t completely obvious, I don’t really know much about the ”scene.”
Technical or social conversations are definitely a common activity. Especially during the first few months of COVID my local repeaters were very active just with people seeking a bit of human community.
Emergency preparedness is a common side hobby; many municipal/county emergency services have a corresponding ARES/RACES group with which they have points of contact, regular drills, and so on.
Other sub-hobbies are more purely technical, like DX (long distance communication; there will be contests with goals like "most different countries contacted"), or QRP (doing as much as possible with minimal radio power); satellite or moonbounce or meteor-scatter; homebrew (building some or all of your equipment); a variety of (usually low bandwidth) packet switched networks; slow-scan video; etc.
Orthogonal to all of the above is the variety of modes and bands people use: you can use VHF FM handhelds not unlike a walkie-talkie; voice or digital or Morse modes; microwave or 2-meter (city-range) or 80-meter (continent-range) or etc; traditional hardware or SDR or deliberately archaic tubes; operating from home or your car or packing your station on foot to a remote mountaintop.
BBS is also a pretty common application.
Many hams think of packet radio in terms of building a single station, for a user-end-terminal, or for a relay, and generally going along with the current in-use frequency for the purpose of getting access to existing other stations.
This turns out to be a bad idea though because channel bandwidth is mostly wasted when participating on the same channel as other disinterested parties to whom you will be interfere, and take interference from. The channel bandwidth actually achieving good result (i.e. message delivery) on a shared channel is pretty minuscule compared to the available bandwidth, because of necessary redundancy, or because of retries, combine with channel time lost to collisions, weak signal, and back-off channel sharing timers.
A much more efficient approach works by having the new station actually consider themselves part of a network, and then creating a cooperative dedicated collision free channel to the next station. This, however, requires considering two stations at a time when "getting on packet". I highly recommend this method as it results in far better channel performance.
NCPACKET.ORG has 35 stations in a well thought out network, and they can run IRC-LIKE 20-way chat sessions which are lively and non-directed, with impunity, and low latency (60 seconds or less from end to end of an 8-hop-wide network).
EDIT: Wrong link.