The Digital Domain of Amateur Radio

Wireless TCP/IP

Did you know that a Class A IP address block - 16.7 Million IP addresses - has been set aside for amateur radio users worldwide to use for connecting their radio equipment to the internet? Amateurs all over the world are using the internet wirelessly, and have been long before "Wireless Web" became a cell phone feature.

Use of the internet over radio dates back to even the DOS days, using a TSR (terminate and stay resident) application to handle the TCP/IP traffic, and command line utilities to handle ping, ftp transfers, and more. Linux has been a major part of using TCP/IP over amateur radio too, being the only operating system to include amateur radio AX.25 protocol support built-in.

And it doesn't have to be limited to just slower packet radio for TCP/IP, either. Some of the newer 802.11 wireless ethernet devices use frequencies that meet with amateur radio spectrum in the 2.4 GHz area. As a result, amateurs can modify the Part 15 compliant devices to increase the power and use better antennas, providing more gain and increasing usable range. These devices are considerably faster at 11 megabits per second than the 1200 and 9600 bit per second speeds of VHF and UHF packet radio.