TPARC Network Vision

In 1989, then club President Farrel (Hoppy) Hopwood had a vision of being able to send text messages from our capital city, Victoria on Vancouver Island, to the interior city of Kamloops during a state of emergency. Hoppy felt that the use of voice messaging was too slow and at times inaccurate. He felt that if a message could be typed and sent out as packet file to the receiving station at high speed and printed as a hard copy, the number of messages sent could increase by six times.

Our original plan was to build all our own equipment with the exception of the radios. Over time it became apparent that this would not work.

Instead, Terminal Node Controllers (TNCs) were purchased. These modems had been in use in the Amateur community for many years. The radios would be supplied to us as surplus equipment by the British Columbia Telephone Company, now TELUS. The Harris radios were once used for the Autotel phone network as mobile radio telephones. They are UHF full duplex Mil. Spec. units that had to be modified to suit our necessary bandwidth.

We planned on interconnecting with existing NetROM and Internet Protocol (IP) based digital communications backbones serving the greater Vancouver, Vancouver Island and Seattle in Washington State with its connections. We also planned to interconnect to the Inter Provincial Amateur Radio Network (IPARN) satellite links that cover Canada through the Anik E-2 Satellite.

While some of those networks have ceased to exist over recent years, we still plan to undertake network affiliations that will help us add levels of redundancy to our systems.

Our current network has 32 ROSE switches (TNC modems) on our backbone. Sixteen of those are user interconnection switches at nine sites with the remaining sixteen acting as point to point 19k2 baud trunking switches on full duplex UHF.

This configuration, along with appropriately equipped amateur service (Ham) stations at the Provincial Emergency Social Services Operations Center and at municipal operations centers, would allow the rapid transmission of communications in an emergency situation.

When not involved in emergency communications, the network is open to all licensed members of the amateur radio community for general digital communications.

Future plans will explore the possibility of overlaying a high-speed TCP/IP radio network on top of the core trunking route and providing high-speed drops to key network locations. These changes will ensure adequate bandwidth is available to handle the major volume of communications necessary during a full-scale emergency, as well as a redundant underlying network as a backup.

For a look at our current network plan have a look at our Switch Configuration page.

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