Re: Amateur Radio - to get weather info, access mail etc?

On Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:36:13 +0100, Marc Heusser
<marc.heusser@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>How do you access internet as a ham? (low bandwidth) ie where do you 
>find gateways (or which are the protocols, nets etc to look for)?

There is no true internet access via ham frequencies that I'm aware
of, however you can send and receive EMAIL via Airmail and Winlink as
long as it is non-commercial in nature.  The gateways and frequencies
can be downloaded using Airmail software and a telnet connection.
The protocols are Pactor 1, 2 and 3 (3 being the fastest), and are
defined by the Pactor TNC device.  There are ways of retrieving web
pages via EMAIL which is sometimes useful.  I use it for getting stock
quotes and news when I'm offshore.  The Pactor protocol has excellent
error detection and retransmission capability.  It also dynamically
adjusts transmission rates to optimize for changing signal strength
and interference.

More information here:

http://www.airmail2000.com/

http://www.winlink.org/

http://www.sailmail.com/
  (non-ham commercial service although
reasonably priced using same basic hardware and software)