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.

One of our Club members, Brian, has a node - GB7SOM - which has a BBS installed and is active. At the time of writing, this node is fairly new and is ideal just to find out a little bit more about how to use it.

To get on to GB7SOM, we need to go through GB7NBH. However, from where this post is being written, I can't get straight on to GB7NBH up in Bath and will need to go through MB7NSC. Here's how I linked to GB7SOM from my location...

Connecting to a new node GB7SOM

We can see that one of the commands that we have available is BBS, so let's use that to get on to the BBS system on GB7SOM. This is a node and BBS that we've never used before and we would typically get asked one, or more, questions when we link into it (name, qth and home BBS); but let's see what happens here...

Getting on the the BBS on GB7SOM

We didn't get asked anything, but we can still use the BBS on this node. The BBS knows who we are (G5JJ) and we can see that there are 46 messages on the system. Beware... some BBS's have a thousand or more messages that can be viewed and asking to list them all will take a long time!

What we need is a better way to view the messages we might be interested in and there are a few ways to go about this. To start with, let's use the LIST LAST command, which is shortened to LL. This is followed by the number of messages that you want to view. For example, to see the last five messages that we have access to...

Using the LL command to list the last 5 messages

These five bulletins (note the BN in the third column) have a corresponding message number with the latest listed first... message 43 is a bulletin received on 16th June and covers the news relating to DXpeditions. We can also see that there are different types of bulleting - NEWS, CHESS and HUMOR, in this example. These types, or categories, can also be listed by running the LIST CATEGORY command, or LC...

Using the LC command to list categories

Next to each category is a number; this shows how many messages there are in that category. We can see that there is a message in the AMSAT category but if we wanted to read it, we'd need to know the message number. To find that out, use the LIST command with a greater than symbol and the category name... L> AMSAT

Finding out the message numbers in a category

To read a message, use the READ command followed by the message number. The READ command is shortened to R, so we used R 10 to read message number 10

Reading a specified message

Some messages are long... very long... like this particular AMSAT one, as it goes on to list the TLE data for each satellite. What we could do with is a way to quit the output; remember we mentioned before about BBS's that have hundreds, if not thousands, of messages? If you inadvertently list all of them, instead of just what you want to see, it's a long wait to get to the end!

However, we can abort the output by typing A and pressing <ENTER>. The output will be aborted but it doesn't happen instantaneously as whatever is in the buffer also needs to be flushed out; be prepared to wait a short while for that to happen.

Don't worry about forgetting the commands... typing a question mark, ?, will bring up the help file...

Accessing the Help file!

That's enough for this post, so we will end this session by typing in BYE. This disconnects us from the network. In the next post we will look at setting ourselves up to send messages.