[aprssig] Major Problems Developing on 30 Meters APRS

[Stephen H. Smith]

I have been driving cross-country again from Michigan back to California 
via I-80, I76, I-70 and I-15 and have spent many hours monitoring 30M HF 
APRS while on the road in more remote areas.  As monitored in the 
Mid-West and Great Plains, the amount of activity heard is far far 
higher than I hear at home in Pasadena, CA, and a lot more than I heard 
on a similar trip last March.

1)  I'm beginning to see a lot of useless beaconing of home stations 
that are not gates, igates, etc.

2)  Increasing numbers of clueless and ill-conceived paths such as 
"ECHO, ECHO, GATE" that are generating even more unneccessary clutter on 
the channel.  I am hearing west coast home stations, doing nothing, 
showing up in the midwest with two or three successive transmissions. 
Perhaps the most idiotic path I monitored in the last two days was:
    ECHO,ECHO,GATE,WIDE3-3,GATE      ( ! )

In my experience, there is really no reason to ECHO or GATE at all if 
all you are trying to do is show up on the internet.  There are a lot of 
"invisible" igates monitoring 10.149  that don't transmit.  In my tests 
in the remotest areas (monitoring my own webserver via a mobile Wi-Fi 
connection while transmitting on the HF rig), I have NEVER failed to get 
to the Internet with NO PATH AT ALL !!

3)  Excessively long comment fields ala VHF are beginning to appear on 
30M along with a few clueless users sending raw NMEA strings (i.e. dumb 
TNC) instead of using more compact formats.    Raw NMEA at 300 baud 
takes forever and has a virtually zero chance of being successfully 
received!

4)  Increasing numbers of stations attempting to converse via APRS 
messages, either RF-to-RF or RF-to/from-igates creating large numbers of 
retries since the ack gets missed so often.

4)  A Pactor BBS systems (Winlink ???) has taken up residence just below 
10.149 and renders the APRS channel unusable whenever it is in operation.