Finds... (mainly Heathkit 3400)

Roger.. congrats on the license and upgrade. Some while back the subject of classiccmpers who are also hams came up. I think somewhere around half of the active participants have the Affliction. Hmmm... a Classic Computer Collector's Net on 20 or 40 Meters? We'd need to get Sellam licensed... ;} Anyway... if by Packrat you mean an AEA PK232... they are a very nice TNC/Modem/Decoder... function set depending on the ROM Rev. And, (ObClassiccmp) I managed to purchase PK232 serial number 76 from a big ham store in Los Angeles the week they were introduced. After serial #100, production was transfered to Hong Kong, where it remained until AEA went under in 95 or 96 (IIRC). Also (ObClassiccmp) the PK232s were run by a classic Z80 chipset. And yes, I still own it, and two others of later vintage I picked up along the way. If you need any help getting it on the air, let me know via private e-mail and I'll try to help. Did you get any front-end software for it? Especially the AEA product, PC-PakRatt? Any 'KISS' TNC software will talk to the 232, and it has a native 'command-line' oriented structure that can be accessed by anything that speaks RS232 ASCII, from 57 to 115K baud. Many folks use them with dumb terminals, or PCs running terminal emu software. Once, just for the Halibut, I hooked mine up to a DecWriter I and it worked fine. Cheerz KB6SCO /portable VU2