Internet Radio Linking Project - History

History

IRLP was invented by David "Dave" Cameron, VE7LTD. Born and raised in West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Cameron attended the University of British Columbia where he joined the UBC Amateur Radio Society. He built his first repeater and computer-based repeater controller in the 1990s.

Cameron installed the first three IRLP nodes in November 1997. They used the Windows operating system (OS) with VocalTec's iPhone installed. There were problems with the software, mainly in the fact that iPhone is not very stable nor is it controllable. After running iPhone for close to 6 months on active connections to Vernon, British Columbia, Canada and Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, Cameron decided to rebuild the nodes and essentially start over. This is when the Linux OS and the Speak Freely software were first tested.

On November 12, 1998, the VE7RHS node was first installed in Gage Towers, UBC, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada using Linux. A few days later, the VE7RVN node came online from the residence of Michael Paul Illingby, VE7TFD in Vernon, British Columbia, Canada. Since this point, no further problems were experienced. This planted the seed for the IRLP network to grow. New nodes slowly launched across Canada, followed by the United States and worldwide.

Node numbers were originally set at 3 digits in length. Due to the extensive growth of the IRLP network, an extra digit needed to be added in 2002. Existing node numbers after this change received a trailing zero. For example, if your node number was 123, it was now 1230. Most existing reflectors were also converted from single channels to 10 channels. This new type of reflector was known as a super-reflector. After all the reflectors were converted the "super-" was dropped.