[aprssig] Economics 101 or APRS 'Theory of Diminishing Returns'

[Henk de Groot]

At 13:59 27-1-2005 -0500, Robert Bruninga wrote:
>Yes.  When you are surrounded by more than 180 stations
>that can hit you direct, then the only way to fit them into the
>1200 baud channel without significant reliability issues is
>to operate only direct.

There is another way, that's reducing the duty cycle. What matters is the 
amount of transmitted packets, so you either reduce the path so there are 
less copies, or you do not transmit as often.

You could consider to lower the net cycle time from 10 minutes to 15 
minutes for example or have static objects send much less frequent and 
handle such stations with a POS file.

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that reducing the path is not the only 
option to reduce trafic and avoid channel overload.

Extreme example proving this point:

A station with a path like: RELAY,RELAY,RELAY,RELAY will NOT cause any 
problem at all if he transmits this packet only once every february 29th 
(so once every 4 years). An ALOHA network can sustain paths like that if 
they accur much more infrequently.

Kind regards,

Henk.