Amateur Radio use of STANAG 5066

The NATO standard STANAG 5066 is used extensively for HF commercial and government data communications but to date there has been little Amateur use.
This may change with recent open-source developments.

In a discussion about HF networking standards on the Digital Ham Radio reflector at http://groups.yahoo.com/
group/illinoisdigitalham/ Bonnie KQ6XA made reference to the "Open 5066" project.

This project is an open source implementation of NATO NC3A STANAG 5066 protocol stack for HF radio communications and full details can be found at http://open5066.org/

Bonnie's Email reproduced with permission:

There are several existing HF networking protocols in use, that have already solved the collision problems. Some of them rely upon ALE (Automatic Link Establishment) with the FED-1045 or MIL-STD 188-141B standard protocols. ALE uses anti-collision methods, multiple channels, and channel occupancy checking to avoid interference in multi-user HF spectrum. If one channel is busy, it moves to another one until it finds a good one.

An example of an HF network of ham operators using ALE, is the Ham Radio Global High Frequency Network (HFN).
It uses global standards adapted to ham radio- click here http://hflink.com/hfn

The ALE system provides an interface between the physical layer (over the air) and the first protocol layer for setting up the links, then other physical layers and protocol layers are utilized for data transfer. It is in daily use by hams and the majority of other services using HF in the world today.
You can get free software for it click here - http://hflink.com/software

The STANAG-5066 standard is an HF-IP system. There is "Open 5066" software Sampo Kellomäki using Linux- click here - http://open5066.org

The STANAG 5066 system is widely used by other services, with commercial software (not free) and various hardware.
5066 provides the protocol layers. The initializing lower layer and interface for it are often provided by ALE. Various HF modem formats can be utilized.
I am not aware of a ham HF network that uses 5066 yet.

73 Bonnie KQ6XA

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