[HECnet] Intermittent Connection with PyDECnet?

[Dave McGuire]

On 3/2/20 1:23 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
>>  I did something very similar about ten years ago.  I was stuck in
>> rural West Virginia for several months dealing with a family estate.  It
>> was a huge house on a gigantic piece of land, and was awesome in just
>> about every way, except unbelievably isolated.  No network access of any
>> kind available there, except Hughes satellite, which is unusable for
>> really much of anything.
>>
>>  I put DDWRT on a WRT-54G, paired it with a small Yagi, and scanned
>> around.  I ended up pointing it at the lights on a distant mountaintop
>> on the other side of the valley, and, as you said, bingo.  We ran with
>> that for about nine months.  I still have no idea of whose connectivity
>> that was.
> 
> The complication: if you operate this as a ham radio link, you're fine with high power or gain antennas, but you have to make it ID, and you have to worry about the traffic carried.  On the other hand, if it's a Part 15 device (the usual mode) then the gain antenna might not be legal.  (I don't actually know the rules, but I would think that EIRP limits are part of it, and/or type acceptance certificate rules that say you can't modify the design.)

  Yup, there are many rules covering that sort of thing.  I follow the
rules of ham radio religiously, but essentially ignore the other ones.
I tried to care, but I just couldn't make it happen.  Sitting in the
middle of hick-land West Virginia ("Psst, hey sis, you awake?") I needed
a connection to civilization and would stop at nothing to get it.

  Perhaps amusingly and somewhat related, on that same trip, I was so
bored at one point that I decided it was time to re-up my long-expired
ham radio license.  I brushed up on the rules, and drove to neighboring
Maryland for a hamfest.  I took and passed all three tests in one
sitting, walked in with no license (but with ham radio experience) and
walked out with paperwork for a soon-to-be-issued Extra class ticket.

             -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA