Bulletins from the Pacific Packet Radio Society - page 045

I am willing to do two things to got boards up to you:

1) Once my board tests ok, I am willing to go silent for a while if you would like to see the board delivered to you.

2) 1 will send you several wave-soldered, tested, beta-level (re-worked ) boards with just the hardware test software and a primitive TAPR protocol on PROM, so that people will be able to experiment. I have no qualms about your burning VADCG software and using these boards without any TAPP protocol in them, but I must know the board is working from a hardware point of view before It is sent out. I have spoken now to over a dozen owners of VADCG boards who have each told me a story about how hard It was to get the board on the air, and I would like to avoid that with our boards if Possible. There is nothing to prevent a ham receiving a working board in the mall, if we are careful and check all boards before mailing.

I will try to check into this prnet daily over the weekend. I have begun to write the protocol specifications for the TAPR protocol. The only differences in our protocol from a fundamental point of view is the dynamic addressing and lack of modem ( just transceiver ) turnaround, The addressing is the driving force for a net control station, and the existence of this Station allows other functions to be incorporated, all on what I would consider to be level 3a,, the interface between IP and the HDLC. The linking schemes mentioned to date In the AMRAD newsletter are just link server protocols, residing in the level 3 protocol, and not meant to be used for what I would call true inter-netting.

I will leave a copy of the protocol specification in a public file here for general perusal in two weeks, when our first revision of the software is done.

Talk to you later

73, Dan

FILE QST.82.04.09.0.W2PPY

Hank -

No action needed on the WD250-Bs. I suspect, due to the"uniformity of the glitch, that there may be timing differences between the WD and National parts. I spoke with a National sales engineer (not mentioning this problem), and he said that there were somewhere in the order of thirteen (!!!) one-shots on that chip, and that the early versions (of National's part) had timing problems that were temperature-sensitive.

The track-record on the National INS8250 has been very good, so far. We purchased 25 of these for stuffing the VADCG TNC boards. No funny symptoms in the entire lot.

It may be appropriate to alert some of the other groups about the possible problem. The date code on the "funny" WD8250-Bs is 8015. To the best of my knowledge, this problem hasn't cropped

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