Currently authentication in packet radio is somewhat lacking. Passwords are sent in the clear over RF and could be intercepted by anyone. One exception is BPQ's SYSOP password tool that sends a string of characters over the air similar to a nonce which are then entered into a tool to generate a one time password that can securely be sent back over the air.

Whilst this works I'd love to see a more generalised method, and I'd suggest the use of Time-based One Time Passwords which are supported in apps such as Google Authenticator and Authy. These would allow secure one-time passwords without breaching any rules on encryption.

In current packet radio usage there's no way of confirming that a message that has potentially been relayed through 10s of nodes and hasn't been tampered with in transit and actually originates from the person that allegedly sent it. It would be great if we could utilise public key cryptography like PGP to sign and validate messages.

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Viewdata a system used in the early 80s. It's very similar to Teletext but would operate over a 1200/75 baud modem attached to a phoneline, allowing users to send data as well as receive it.

I think it's a great candidate to send data over packet radio with slightly richer formatting whilst still maintaining minimal overheads, and the method of entering numbers to access different pages also lends itself to packet.

For an example of how it can work see G6AML's Youtube Video

• It would be great if things were easily “plugable” to support different compression and encoding etc

The chat built into BPQ is fairly basic and missing some features that would significantly increase usability. I would like to see the following improvements to a new chat application:

• Some visual clue that a sent message has been acknowledged, or rejected. Currently it appears like a message has been sent successfully, but might not have been acked by that chat server.
• Timestamp / Sequence sent with message so they can re-ordered