🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm told that the SANDPAC board will be marketed in kit form for
something around $200 or so by the Tucson Amateur Packet Radio group,
and in some fully-assembled version (probably around $500 or so)
by a ham radio manufacturer.  It's primarily aimed at the ham
radio market, but every other ham packet radio product has been
snapped up by non-ham users, so I wouldn't be surprised if that
happened with this one too.

I have one of 10 prototypes.  The others are out at various places
around the country where similarly demented people such as myself
are porting things to it: other kinds of networking code, such as
the Net/Rom product (a proprietary datagram forwarding system);
and Phil Karn at Bellcore has one he's playing tcp/ip with.  I'm
told that the board has also been made to run some version of MS-DOS
(ecch).

The radio link speed is limited by legal bandwidth restrictions
for the most part.  1200 bps is by far most widely used, since with
inexpensive modems it occupies about the same radio bandwidth as
a voice signal and so is well tolerated by the other users of the
ham bands.  9600 bps is used in some less-dense areas of the ham 
bands.  A prototype 56Kbit radio modem is available from some
experimenters in Florida for about $200 or so in partial-kit form,
but you have to add about $500 of parts and radio to complete that.

More information on the SANDPAC PS-186 board is probably available 
from the developers (write to mike@net1.ucsd.edu).  A paper discussing 
the hardware design issues was published in the 6th ARRL Computer
Networking Conference Proceedings, available for under $20 from
the American Radio Relay League in Newington, Connecticut, or at
large ham radio stores in your hometown.  Those Proceedings and
earlier ones also present the evolution of digital communications
in the ham radio field, and might be interesting reading.  There is 
also a USENET newsgroup and corresponding Internet mailing list for ham 
packet radio topics.

Thanks for the advice!
	- Brian