DaveInDenver
Middle Income Semi-Redneck
The AX.25 protocol can support an IP layer, but how common is it on digipeaters nodes to have Internet gateways? Does anyone track them or are they noted in the repeater guide? I wonder if the proliferation of IRLP nodes might make Internet gateways more common. Getting an Internet connection to the repeater site would seem to be a problem since they are often not in easy to access locations.
Besides finding digital repeaters with Internet gateways (not all repeaters are digital repeaters and not all digipeaters are gateways), it seems to me your hurdle here is speed. Ham packet radio is by necessity very bandwidth limited. You're talking 9600 baud (i.e. ~1 KB/s) here, IOW dial-up BBS speeds. A 100KB JPEG is gonna take a couple of minutes to upload at least. It will be frustratingly slow I'd think. The system was set up to pass little text-based messages around, not really heavy hitting data throughput.
Besides finding digital repeaters with Internet gateways (not all repeaters are digital repeaters and not all digipeaters are gateways), it seems to me your hurdle here is speed. Ham packet radio is by necessity very bandwidth limited. You're talking 9600 baud (i.e. ~1 KB/s) here, IOW dial-up BBS speeds. A 100KB JPEG is gonna take a couple of minutes to upload at least. It will be frustratingly slow I'd think. The system was set up to pass little text-based messages around, not really heavy hitting data throughput.