Hello Rick, Your tone makes me suspect this is yet another attack on a system you do not understand or care for, but I'll assume your questions are sincere and try to answer them. :-)
>I have often wondered why they are called pilot stations. That sounds >like they are the early experimental ones? Or does that mean something else? > > We also used the term "anchor" stations. Pilot as in "guide". Known functional, debugged, available on published frequencies, with operators committed to helping new stations work out kinks in their setup. One of the biggest issues with new digital modes is for people to have a known good station to test against. I've fought this with friends, where you don't know if either of you have it right. ALE usage on ham bands really took off once we had stations available for connect 24x7. I know from past posts you do not believe this, but I see the activity and new stations every week. No deep dark science, the pilot stations idea came out of a conversation Bonnie and I had when I commented it was much easier to get an ALE station running on MARS since there were multiple stations available 7x24. We agreed we needed this for the ham side, kicked around some concepts, and the Pilot station approach was born. For what it's worth, anyone wanting to be a pilot station has to meet several criteria including: History of 7x24 availability, multi-band capability, commitment to participate for N months, Internet access, etc. They also happen to be messaging/bbslink backends and are part of our core infrastructure. Unlike some other messaging systems, we operate on common frequencies. We've also focused on obtaining geographic coverage. Right now we have very good coverage of N/Central America 7x24. We don't need 14 pilot stations in 4 or 6 land, etc. We are actively looking for stations to come on in EU, AP, S America, Africa, etc. There are hams active on ALE in these areas, but other than OZ and HK none have made the commitment to be a pilot station. >What is the real difference between using SMTP vs Winlink 2000's >network? What does it mean for the users? > 1) Redundancy. You can route messages directly via the internet, or via winlink. ISP's can have outages, etc. Redundancy is always good 2) Like it or not, winlink is the defacto emergency messaging system for most hams, and certainly for MARS. So having WL2K inter operation was important, and it allows non-pactor stations to communicate with the EOC's, etc. 3) Like it or not, the WL2K infrastructure is a known, defined, and functional messaging system built around the ham BBS paradigm. At it's heart is the same W0RLI/F6FBB BBS interface, and it's easy to interface to >It would seem that going >through the HFLink system and then the Winlink 2000 system would add >unnecessary layers of complexity to a very complex system and internet >routing. > > See above. Multiple network paths and inter operation/bridges are a good thing. They add no complexity to the users. Accessing the WL2K messaging infrastructure is no more complicated than sending via SMTP, and a very large percentage of the ham HF email userbase is active on WL2K. >What does it mean when you say "according to the needs and availability >of the resource"? > > There were several design objectives to the HFLink & MARS ALE bbslink system: 1) Support of HW ALE radios. They are pretty much locked out of pactor, multi-line messaging, etc. You can send, receive, list, delete messages from a HW ALE radio over ALE/BBSlink 2) Some radios/software do not have DBM/DTM capability. Some controllers have it, but it's not quite "right" in terms of compatibility. So again, we support AMD as a "least common denominator" while extending into DBM, then HW TNC modes, and ultimately the full suite of mil protocols. On MARS we will extend into the high speed modems as well since they are legal there. 3) Sometimes you need a single line, sometimes more. AMD works great, is available to pretty much all HF ALE stations. We still use it quite a bit even though the multiline modes are available. Have fun Alan km4ba / afa2ns
