Sorry 'bout that. That's one of the penalties of having to work on NT while I'm at work.
> There is packet on most bands from 40 meters to 10ghz, but of course a
> "moving" packet stn, on VHF/UHF will be quite difficult, 1) you will get out
> of range very quickly from any repeter/node you use, 2) You would need a
> complete list of frequencies from the East coast to West.
Would this make it impractical, though? From what I have read, 1200 baud is pretty common on 2m. IP over 1200 would not be unbearable, but would be quite slow; I would probably write my own utilities to retrieve compressed mail via a connectionless protocol (just to save bandwidth). Since I will be mobile, another question comes up here: would I talk to the same gateway, or would I talk to a different gateway? If it's different, I imagine I'd need a new IP address everytime I change gateways, making the idea pretty impractical.
> However if your choice is HF,bands then the out of range problem will not be
> so apparent, this has one BIG draw back, on HF the speed is 300 only baud.
Not to mention that the antenna would be quite inconvienient to place on top of my van...
> If you are not a licsenced ham you can use mobile phones for accessing the
> net, your local vendor will know more.
Yes, this was always an option. The only problem is that it's quite boring, expensive, and I've done it already. I would love to learn radio, especially HF. And I want to make this cross country trip a venture into new territory. Consequently, I'm designing a good portion of the equipment for the van, etc...
Does this idea still sound feasible? Are their better alternatives?
Thanks again for the input.