[aprssig] APRS routing strategies

[Wes Johnston]

Quoting Robert Bruninga <bruninga at usna.edu>:
> I think users are smart enough to figure out
> what a digipeater is and what range each one
> means.  After all, they user VOICE repeaters all
> the time and have an idea what range to expect...
>
>
> >How does the *user* detemine it must be 4 hops?
> >Why not 3 or 5? Better yet, does the user care?
>
> Absolutely he should!  He should be using 3 if he
> needs to go 3 hops and he should never use
> 5 as he will QRM too much area...


If the average new APRS user could figure out that a path of WIDE5-5 or 7-7
would QRM 1/2 the east coast, we wouldn't be having this discussion! ;-)
(just poking fun at you Bob!)

I see your point with the voice repeater, but the big _but_ is that voice
repeaters all segmented onto different frequencies.  You can't key up one
repeater and tie up all of them for 5 states around.  With APRS on 144.39 and
WIDE or WIDEn-n, you can... and the worst part is, most don't even know they're
doing it.

I like the CITY LOCAL REGIONAL generic naming... And the digipeater selects the
"specific" group name for the digi's depending on the generic alias you choose
to TX.  It's as revolutionary an idea as naming all the digipeaters RELAY and
WIDE was 10 years (or more) ago.  Now we just have to 1)agree on generic
aliases to indicate a range, 2)get the TNCs to assign these generic calls a
specific group, and 3)make the TNCs digipeat up to 10 or so groups.

Wes
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