[aprssig] New and playing

[Wes Johnston]

A few weeks ago, I was really wound up about people running crazy paths... and
then it dawned on me... since there is no "one size fits all" solution to
proper paths, the NETWORK should do the path'ing for us.... These people are
making _my_ digipeater do silly things... I should have more contol over _my_
equipment.  DigiNED for example can alter a station's path on the fly to suit
local customs or for damage control.  Although I am not endorsing running w7-7,
I would love to see our APRS network evolve into a smart network where some
joker can run w7-7 all day long and not adversely affect the network.

In practical terms, some (Ahem... Bob) will say you cannot count on the digi
op's to upgrade firmware in TNCs... BUT, IMHO, if and when the digi owners get
fed up with the network not working because it is saturated with packets from
300 miles away, they _will_ do something to fix it.

KC4PL here has taken the proactive step to not digipeat any packet with more
than 3 hops in the path with javaaprs.  My druthers would be for him to A)fix
the path and alter it to be 3_Hops_Maximum - Hops_Already_Taken , or B)not
digipeat any packet which has already traveled 3 hops (so we would digipeat
w7-7 thru w7-4 but not w7-3 thru 7-0... but the way it's done now, it makes him
a good neighbor... he's not digipeating the w7-7 packets at all... they fall on
the floor.

What would be really slick would be to migrate to another alias over time...
such as the LANn-n and LINKn-n systems for the locals (who know the local paths
and customs), and treat _any_ packet which has WIDEn-n referenced in it's path
as a "dumb" out of town'er and swap his path to the local custom.  Or better
still, where a traveller could run a simple path like RELAY,IGATE and the
digipeaters would alter his path to the nearest IGATE.  I guess what I'm
getting at in this last paragraph is that it'd be kinda neat to treat the name
WIDE like IGATE in my example.... it'd be slick if simply seeing WIDEn-n in a
path would mean "Please route me to the internet over the shortest RF path". 
People who knew the lay of the local land would be able to take advantage of
LANn-n and LINKn-n's.

Wes


--
Quoting Robert Bruninga <bruninga at usna.edu>:
> Sorry, I get wound up, but the APRS channel is getting worse,
> not better and I cant just sit by and watch it become a useless
> internet video game which is functinonally useless in the real world
> on RF for a local event...  except for the stations that run 100W
> and use the path of WIDE7-7...
>
> de WB4APR, Bob
>
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