[aprssig] A few thoughts from the road

[Tom Russo]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 12:53:33AM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <needhame1 at plateautel.net> flavor, containing:
> 
> 	Hey, I'm in Clovis, New Mexico -- that's about 200 miles east of 
> Albuquerque and only 100 miles northwest of Lubbock, Texas, in DM84jk.

I live near Escabosa, NM, about 20 mi. SE of Albuquerque, in DM64ux.  My APRS
experience here near town is very different from what you're experiencing out
near Clovis.

At least in my view from near Albuquerque, the WIDEN-n situation is a mess.  

> 	I just got home from a week on the road.  Had a lot of time to think 
> 	about things and listen to the actual audio on 144.39 around the country.  
> It was pretty busy in Salt Lake city, not quite so busy near Albuquerque, 

Egad.  If the racket I hear near Albuquerque when *I* turn up the volume on 
the data channel is "not quite so busy" then I don't wanna know what busy is.  
I hear almost continuous traffic with obvious signs of overlapping wide 
digipeaters stepping all over each other.  As I watch the panel of my D700 when 
in town, the packets are getting clobbered so badly that only a very small 
fraction are decoded.  At one point I wondered if it was just message traffic
the D700 wasn't displaying, but that hope was quashed when I actually watched
the packet monitor.  It's just undecodable cacophony.

Of the nearly 150 stations I've got showing up on my home (RF-only) station, 
81 are digipeaters, most of them WIDEN-n digis, and a large fraction of those 
are in states.  I'm seeing digipeaters from as far away as 500 miles, most of 
those using WIDE5-5 or WIDE7-7 paths.  Looking at some of the paths, they're 
getting from the NM border to Albuquerque in about 3 hops (in fact, the 
farthest station is down near Del Rio, TX --- it took 4 hops to get to the 
first New Mexico digi near Capitan, and two hops from there to get to me).  

All of that is brought to me courtesy of the three WIDEN-n digis that 
constitute the only stations I can hear directly from the home station.

When I have to mess around with low-power trackers just about anywhere in 
central NM reliability is marginal or nonexistent, largely because it is 
difficult for the trackers to get a word in edgewise to the digipeaters --- 
they can't hear the traffic and think the channel's clear, but the digi can't 
hear them because it's too busy listening to 4 other digis non-stop, passing
WIDE7-7 packets from digipeaters in central Texas to the ether near central 
Arizona.

Something that needs fixed here in NM, at least in central NM.  I'm not quite 
sure what it is or how dramatically things need changed, but something's gotta
get tweaked to get the APRS network cleaned up here.  

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY     SAR502  DM64ux         http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 
 "When life gives you lemons, find someone with a paper cut."