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.

We found the BBS address of G7BEH by using the information command, I, followed by the callsign. However, there are other options with this command which can be very useful. Firstly, we can find the addresses of stations, using wildcards in the callsign - so, if you can't remember the entire callsign, this can be one way of finding the callsign and address. For example, I G4* gives us information on all G4 callsigns on the network.

Using a wildcard in searches

This actually turned up a couple of interesting points to note!

Callsign G4LML has his BBS set as GB7COV, but this is not the full hierarchical address that might be needed if we were sent Bill a message. Fortunately, we can find the full hierarchical address by using a slightly different form of the I command... I@ <bbs_name>

Finding information about a BBS

By using the command, we have found that the full hierarchical address of GB7COV is... GB7COV.#29.GBR.EU

We can also see that two users are using this BBS as their home BBS: G1CQL and G4LML.

Returning briefly to our original request for information on G4* calls, we can also see that Brian, G4ETN (and TDARC member!) has not yet set his home BBS. Looking at our local BBS, GB7BWR, reveals that there are four users who have this BBS set as their home BBS.

Looking at our local GB7BWR BBS

Here's another interesting point... MW0CQU has GB7BWR set as their home BBS, but does not have the full hierarchical address set. As we are currently on the GB7BWR BBS, we can still send them a message by using the S MW0CQU@GB7BWR command.

The full hierarchical address consists of four elements...

1. The BBS node (GB7BWR)
2. The region that it is in (#45)
3. The country (GBR)
4. The continent (EURO)

One of the first questions we had was... how do we know which region we're in? At one level, it actually doesn't matter, as once you know your BBS address, then you don't need to know any more. However, here at TDARC, we're a curious bunch (in more ways than one...) and we wanted answers!

The regional number consists of two digits in the UK. The first of these numbers identifies a core UK packet radio region...

• #1: Northern England
• #2: Midlands
• #3: South East
• #4: South West
• #5: Wales
• #6: Northern Ireland
• #7: Scotland

We've already seen that GB7BWR in Bridgwater has the regional code starting #4 (the South West) and GB7COV (Coventry) has the regional code starting #2 (the Midlands). The second digit gives the county code, such that #45 resolves to Dorset & Somerset, and #29 resolves to Warwickshire, West Midlands. You can find the full list of regional identifiers at https://ukpacketradio.network/packetmail

We now have a problem though... what if our recipient is not in the UK? How do we know, or how does the system know, how to route the message? For that the system needs to understand which country / continent is it being sent to. For countries we have, GBR for the UK, but there's also FRA for France, ITA for Italy, AUT for Austria, DEU for Germany and ESP for Spain. All of these countries fall into the continent of EURO.

We can use our information command to probe into a continental region too, by using IH <continent>...

Probing for information based on our continent

Hierarchical addressing can seem very confusing and a little daunting, but for normal messaging you can find the hierachical address of the BBS that you want to call home, by issuing the I@ <bbs_name> command and then setting your home BBS by using the HOME <mycall>@<bbs_hierarchical_address> format.

You can look up someone's address by using I <callsign> (and if you can't remember all their callsign then you can use wildcards to help).