Hi Rick,
RTTY is dead in MARS in my opinion as to being useful, but still
allowed in all three MARS programs as far as I know, CW was
vanquished some years ago now, prior to my return to MARS. There are
3 MARS as you know and to date, there are different approaches in all
three and many commonalities regarding HF digital communications. I
was NMCM in the 80's until '91 and I have been Army MARS since 2003,
I had to bow out for a number years as career and TDY travel got in
the way. Almost since returning to MARS, I have been involved with
the more to ALE within MARS.
In NMCM these days its mostly MT-63 and PACTOR I, where FEC is used a
lot as programs such as MultiPSK and MixW support a connection
between the TNC user and the PC Sound Device Modem user. This is also
true for Army MARS. In NMCM the BBS system is MDS on DOS and is
PACTOR I. For both Army and Air Force MARS, WL2K PBMO's with AirMail
as the client is being used and 95%+ of the users are PACTOR I based,
Army MARS has shutdown their older MSYS and Winlink Classic BBS
systems just this month and currently has all their eggs in the WL2K
basket. Air Force MARS retains its MSYS and Winlink Classic for
radio-to-radio BBS capability as does NMCM with MDS, and NMCM does
not allow the use of WL2K. As to Air Force MARS attended digital
communications, I am not sure just what the story is outside of my
direct activities, I know MT-63 is also getting heavy use, along with
PACTOR. Basically MARS makes use of all digital modes that are
commonly used by both Amateur Radio, Commercial and the U.S. Military
to some extent, but PACTOR I and MT-63 currently rule, my opinion
obviously, others in MARS may disagree.
In my direct activities, members of all three MARS programs are
working jointly in the use of ALE where a Tri-Service ALE network
operates 24/7 where MARS-ALE is the ALE tool set for most users and
is the ALE LQA front end for the existing and developing MARS Traffic
System. At present we have MARS-ALE via Telnet communicating with
back end servers, one is for network activity reporting automation
and the other is the BBSlink server.
Any MARS-ALE based station can use the report automation tool for
feed the view from their station perspective (its the MARS-ALE/BBS
24/7 perspective that will always be fed) when on-the-air, on a
selected period of all channel acty via Internet e-mail to one or
more end points for display, analysis and reporting in near-real
time, there is an SQLdbase being developed and host of reporting
tools, at present one such feed is to a closed Yahoo forum such as
this one ( http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MARS-ALE-SITREP/ ) where all
that data exposes all the network acty as to Soundings, linking
calls, what stations were linked one on one or one on many etc., and
network diagrams and other reporting can be derived, our reporting
tools are not all in place yet and manual processing has really
become difficult as the acty has increased.
The BBSlink sever at present supports WINLINK.ORG and MARSALE.ORG ( a
new development that uses standard SMTP/POP3 client and webmail when
not on HF) on the back end where only Air Force and Army MARS can use
WL2K. This is a very new development that has only just entered wider
testing. Any supported MARS-ALE ARQ protocol, including the use of
Tactical AMD messages can be used to send and receive e-mail ( AMD is
painful on incoming e-mails if more than one line !) and not just
PACTOR x, MARS-ALE supports a number of ARQ protocols on the PCSDM
and provides external TNC/Modem support. The next addition to the
BBSlink server with be WA8DED emulation so that MDS, MSYS and Winlink
Classic will see MARS-ALE as just a TNC on another port, at that time
NMCM and Air Force MARS will have a full radio-to-radio and Internet
HF e-mail solution as BBSlink will at one site all combinations. My
MARS-ALE/BBS which is running at the moment has accepted traffic
today from stations where test message were send by the Remote ALE
user during the connection using both WINLINK.ORG and MARSALE.ORG
agents in separate messages sent, its just a matter of the addressing
to tell BBSlink which agent to use, the same will be true of
MDS/MSYS/Winlink Classic support when added, thus if Internet is
completely down that BBS has a radio-to-radio path, the user still
has a path to send their out going traffic. Our interface for all
these BBS systems supports the Remote ALE user to list ( if desired)
any incoming messages and chose which to read as during an ECOM event
in the field, one does not want to reading waiting for a ton of
incoming traffic if the order of business is just to send their
outbound traffic, but one may be looking for a specific message or
two inbound, this is not an option when using the normal WL2K PBMO interfaces.
With MARS-ALE the use of AMD, DTM and DBM modes are automatically
detected and if ARQ responded to in same, this is also true of
