Third attempt at a 10GHz contest / activity day...

To be honest, on Saturday evening, I really wasn't feeling it for the following day's contest on 5.7GHz and 10GHz. But, waking up on the morning of the 26th July (2026) - and following a pot of tea - perhaps I should at least try...

The result was that with the time I had available to me, I wasn't going to get the batteries charged for the Yaesu FT290R, which meant a quick charge of the Quansheng handheld plus the two LiPo batteries that power the transverter. Choosing to head up to PIlsdon Pen also meant that I had to log on to ON4KST and change my locator to IO80NT. It was now gone 10:00BST and I had to get everything together, get over to the hill and then hike up it with the equipment... to be back home in time for lunch.

What is it about microwave contests that is so... 'busy'? I always feel unprepared... in the first 10GHz contest, getting used to listening in and watching KST messages flying around, whilst also trying to take notes and point the dish in the right direction was, well, not easy! In the last contest, I thought I would be more prepared, so having set everything up by a field gate, got my bearings and being ready with KST, I felt in control. That lasted about 8 minutes when the 2m talkback was going, KST messages were flying around, I'm still trying to peak the dish and listen to CW at the same time... and then, one of our radio club members also turned up to see what was going on! At which point it sort of descended into a comedy sketch with me thinking that I'm keeping it all together and looking cool and professional, whilst actually being in a complete state of confusion and panic. I don't think Malcolm noticed...

Getting sorted for the 2nd 10GHz contest, watched by Malcolm and the cows...

Back To The Future With Packet Radio - Part 07

This will be last of our packet radio series, at least until later in the year when we will be bringing this story right up-to-date. Although we've covered a lot of ground in this series to date, there's a lot to discover still... chat rooms, 'walls' where you can leave messages, and even teletext style pages that will take you back to the days of Ceefax! You can explore other nodes in other countries by linking to them either by trying HF connections or AX / IP links, then continue exploring with RF links from that point.

Connecting to a chat room on a node in Australia and talking to a user in the US

In this part we will take a look at how you can go and meet yourself on another node by using streams.

Back To The Future With Packet Radio - Part 06

In Part 5, the Club sent and received a message via the GB7BWR BBS, but in order to do so, we needed to find the address of the recipient of our message. In this part, we explored a little more into the world of packet addressing and how to find nodes.

Basic search to find information on a callsign

Packet radio uses hierarchical addressing in order to route messages, so you will need to know which BBS a message should be routed to.

Back To The Future With Packet Radio - Part 05

In part five of our packet radio series, we will see how to send messages to other users. Back in the 80's and 90's the Bulletin Board System (or BBS) was alive and well. It allowed users to send messages to each other - in the last part of the series, we did connect to a BBS and read bulletins that were available to everyone.

A bulleting being read from the BBS

Now we will look at how the Club explored using the BBS for personal messaging.

Back To The Future With Packet Radio - Part 04

We've now spent a little bit of time taking a look at how to find our way around the packet network, using the PORTS and ROUTES commands, and connecting / disconnecting from nodes. This is the basic way that we can get around the network and we've also used the MHEARD command to see who has been seen by the node we're on.

In this post, we'll see how we can use some of the additional functionality that we get from connecting to a GB7xxx node... namely mailboxes using the Bulletin Board System (BBS).

Fancy finding out DX news, QRP news, technical information, updates on earthquakes or just want to leave a message for someone? Let's dive into the world of the BBS.

Back To The Future With Packet Radio - Part 03

In the last part of this series exploring the packet radio network in the South West, we had connected to MB7NSC, looked up which ports were available and which routes were active. This led us to conclude that we could use this node as a springboard to connect to G0NZO, GB7RWY and M0EYT using Port 1 (which was an RF link using 144.950MHz) or GB7GDT, GB7IOW and GB7NBH via Port 2 (another RF link but this time using 439.950MHz).

One of the things that is perhaps not so obvious (other than GB7IOW?) is where these nodes are physically located. For that we have a node map at https://nodes.ukpacketradio.network/ which can really help.

Packet radio node map, available online

As we are currently sitting on MB7NSC, let's hop on over to the Isle of Wight...

Back To The Future With Packet Radio - Part 02

In part 1 of this 'back to the future' series, looking into packet radio using some retro equipment, we found a number of stations that had traffic flowing on 144.950MHz. We had set our TNC to monitor some of the packets that we could hear over the air by using some of the 'monitor' commands. Because of the way that we had set those, when we connect to another node, we would no longer see them... until we disconnect. This is really useful as it can be quite overwhelming to be trying to do something specific on a distant node and still see these messages.

Screenshot showing the results of traffic monitoring

For now, those settings have served their purpose, which was to find out who was on the network and therefore was potentially in range for us to connect to. With that decided, let's dive and see what we can find on packet radio in 2026...