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.
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| Packet radio node map, available online |
As we are currently sitting on MB7NSC, let's hop on over to the Isle of Wight...
GB7IOW is slightly different to MB7NSC in that it has a mailbox server (or BBS - Bulletin Board System). Remember that we are also in CONVERSE mode and whatever we type in will be acted up when we press <ENTER>. To connect to the next node, we can use the CONNECT command, but...
MB7NSC has several ports available and GB7IOW is accessed via Port 2, the 439.950MHz RF link. To make sure we use the correct port, we must specify the port number; so we use C 2 GB7IOW as in the image below.
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| ROUTES and PORTS command run on GB7IOW |
If we now run the PORTS and ROUTES command again (but this time on GB7IOW), we will see that we have different options. Note that GB7IOW is an RF-only node but it does allow the use of HF connections using 7,051.60kHz. However, the ROUTES command did not show any active links available on Port 3 (the HF port), but we can still find out who this node has heard on the 40m band by using the MHEARD command. This is frequently shortened to MH and as we are on a node with several ports we need to specify which port we want the command to act on. In the screenshot below, you can see we used MH 3 as the command and it's listed the previous 30 stations, covering England, Scotland, Eire, The Netherlands and even Italy.
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| A list of stations heard on Port 3 of GB7IOW |
The default output is to show how long since it has been since the station was heard in days:hours:minutes:seconds format, so there were a number of stations five days previously.
We have arrived on GB7IOW by first connecting on to MB7NSC, but we don't need to do that and there is a quicker way! Let's disconnect by entering <CTRL-C> then typing DISC at the cmd: prompt.
To achieve this in one go, we'll add the VIA option to our CONNECT command (VIA can be shortened to V):
cmd: C GB7IOW V MB7NSC
*** CONNECTED to GB7IOW VIA MB7NSC [11-Jun-26 17:52:58.8]
Welcome -OARC Packet Node.
https://packet.oarc.uk
GB7IOW CHAT WALL INFO C,B,N,R,P,U,MH ? for Help
With that we will disconnect from GB7IOW (<CTRL-C> then type DISC) and in the next part we will explore a different node.
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