GB7WIG BBS was on 144950Mhz and on 433.650Mhz and Telnet  Located in JO01HI North Kent  Sysop G6YLW (Trev)

It all started about October 1992 when I put on a packet repeater station.

This was because a BBS started up in the town of Maidstone in Kent.

At this time there were very few repeaters station and none in the Kent area. The Maidstone BBS (GB7OMM) run by Steve Adams (G0OMM) did not have a link to anywhere and needed to link to a BBS in Eltham GB7UWS South London. This was the first time that any station could link into Kent.

With this link it meant that the stations in London could now get to the Kent BBS's.

What was Wig1?

Wig1 is what is called a network node. In layman terms this means a repeater. It is run on a home built computer, which is  (now)

166 Pentium Clone, 64mb of ram, 2*850 Meg Hard drives, Linux Red Hat,  The repeater is software controlled. The software is:, FBB version Linux, JNOS Mail server.

The software is called a switch and at the time in 1992 was an Amstrad 1512 computer with only two disk drives (no hard disk). This ran both the   switch and communication program. All in 500K of memory plus two 360k disks.

 

	This in turn operated just one radio on the amateur band of 2mtr. The radio received one signal feed this to the computer which stored the data for a very short while before re -transmitting it out too the receiving station. Over the years up to 1997 the PC was upgraded to various processors and hard drive which allowed me to run the Node software and do other thing apart from games. These require too much memory. Bear in mind that for most of the time the operating system was MS-DOS. Only Windows 3.0 was around until 1993 when 3.11 became available. In fact the BBS still operates in DOS.      This carried on like this until I took over the BBS (GB7WIG) in 1997. I then upgraded to the current configuration. Since April 1997 the machine has had : Two hard drives, One Video card:  one PSU.  Since Wig1 was put on the air there has been a number of local BBS come and gone. It is now mainly use for mail  forwarding and a few local amateurs who are still using packet radio as well as the Internet. I expect to last or keep going about another year. By that time I will be into sometime else In April / May 2001 the station had a near miss with a lighting strike   This took out the computer of the time, giving  me the chance to upgrade. Stuart (G7JYF) who ran GB7STU help set up the station that is now running the BBS.   All this sadly came to an end on the morning of 7th Feb 2005 when the computer crashed that was carrying the BBS software. After all this time it was not worth rebuild it  Return Index