[SCCC] SoCal DX Spotting Nodes?

[w6ph at aol.com]

Steve et al, Those days are long gone.  The local club clusters were great.  We chatted with each other during the contests.  The spots were all generated by people in the local area.  All the clusters were on VHF with UHF linking, not using the internet.  It was real radio.  It created cohesion within the club.   I was in on the very first packet spotting and PacketClusters in the YCCC.  We used unproto mode with packet digipeaters to send spots.  It became the visual analog to the voice call outs of spots on the local 2M frequency..  AK1A created the software for the PacketCluster mode and soon there was a network all over New England.  It was fun. Then someone came up with the not so brilliant idea of linking to other club networks and that was the beginning of the end of regional clusters.  The internet became the linking medium. Is my bias too evident? 73, Kurt W6PH formerly W1PH In a message dated 4/15/2021 10:55:14 AM Pacific Standard Time, k0xp at k0xp.com writes: 
At 08:05 AM 4/15/2021, Clayton Nall wrote:>Just curious—with the firehose of RBN spots, are >2m-based clusters still feasible, or are there bandwidth problems? I'd sure hope they're still feasible. I miss the camaderie I had with all the other guys who were on the PVRC cluster back some 25 years ago, and to a lesser extent, up in Mashachewzits. We could, and did, PM one another all the time, sharing personal observations on someone's signal or what we were actually hearing from some DX station. Sometimes, the whole cluster (the one I'm remembering most fondly was based on W3LPL as the center hub at the time; I was connected to the W0YVA node but there were up to 8 or 10 other nodes comprising the whole W3LPL cluster, which covered all of Maryland, most of Northern Virginia and West Virginia, Delaware and parts of southeastern PA and northern NC) was connected to other clusters and one could jawbone with others in far-flung clusters well out of V/UHF range. We even had "For Sale/Wanted" lists (those were not generally shared by the various clusters, so they were mainly local). There were other features available that we don't get with today's internet spotting systems, which seem relatively sterile and very limited by comparision. SteveH K0XP  _______________________________________________SCCC mailing listSCCC at contesting.comhttp://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/sccc