This discussion brings back fond memories of watching the “slow scan TV” over packet radio ever so slowly rendering low res images of a family we used to talk to in the US from Australia on my dads rig with his 60ft antenna out the back. This was the early 1990s before the Internet was a thing. We ended up travelling to meet that family in Texas in 1994.

I recall in Texas there was some ham repeaters that patched you into the local phone network using DTMF, but can’t recall exactly what it was called. Phone calls in Australia at the time were costly so it was really a novelty.