4.3.2 What It Means
There are different types of packets that will mean different things
to your PK-232. Your PK-232 keeps track of and knows what to do with
all these packets and so the user does not have to worry about them
most of the time. Since the PK-232 has the capability of "Monitoring"
all the packet activity on a channel we'll briefly discuss the types
of packets you will most often see. Skip to the next section if you
do not plan on doing much channel monitoring.
Let's look at the first packet in the examples above and get
acquainted with what it all means.
N7ALW*>WA7GCI [C]
Every single packet you send will have your callsign (the one you just
entered in MYCALL) as the first callsign of the packet. The callsign
after the ">" is the next station the packet will go to. So the
packet listed above originates from N7ALW and is being sent to WA7GCI.
All packets will have at least these two callsign fields.
The "[C]" immediately following the two callsigns identifies this
packet as a CONNECT Request. So we see that N7ALW is requesting a
packet CONNECTION with WA7GCI.
The second packet in the above examples is a response to the first.
WA7GCI*>N7ALW (UA)
In this case we see that WA7GCI is sending to N7ALW by the order of
the callsigns. This packet acknowledges the Connect request as shown
by the "(UA)" which stands for Un-numbered Acknowledge.
One benefit of packet radio is that packets can be relayed or
"digipeated" by any station on the same frequency. In fact, packets
can be relayed by up to eight other stations to get them to a distant
station you cannot reach directly. In practice, digipeating through a
large number of stations does not work very well, but still you will
often see packets that are digipeating through one or two stations to
get to their destination. The packet shown below is an example of a
digipeated packet.
K6RFK>N7ALW*>N7GMF:
Goodnight John, its been nice talking to you.
This packet originated from K6RFK and is being sent to N7GMF but is
"Digipeated" through the station N7ALW. We also see that this packet
contains data by the text "Goodnight John...". Another thing that
should be noticed in this packet is the asterisk (*) in the first
line. The asterisk tells which station was actually heard sending the
packet. In this case, we can see that we actually heard radio station
N7ALW. Without the asterisk, we could not tell whether the
transmission came from radio station K6RFK or N7ALW. More will be
discussed about digipeating later, but the above example is typical.
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