[aprssig] RE: IGate Abuse (Firenet Data)

[Curt Mills]

On Sun, 6 Mar 2005, KK6RW wrote:

> Just to clarify, my Tier 2 server, northwest.aprs2.net does not provide
> Firenet data in any form. I perviously operated a Firenet server, but now only
> "normal" APRS-IS traffic. I'm sorry if I did not clarify my current APRS
> activity.
> 
> I believe there is at least one APRS server that does offer Firenet data in
> our NWAPRS area however the server name escapes me.
> 
> I'll echo your statement that the NWAPRS group members work well together to
> offer a APRS network that works very well.

I'm one of the people injecting loads of objects into Firenet and am
a member of the Firenet group.  Perl scripts snag data from various
places and generate APRS-format objects which then get posted to
Firenet.  I'm also a member of NWAPRS, perhaps one of the best run
of any of the APRS networks due to the amount of fine-tuning and
cooperation between all of the people involved.

Do I dare say that some of my script-generated objects are making it
to local RF, and the people here actually don't mind that?  Oh
please, don't come after me too!!!  ;-)

I am not however an igate, except for Xastir testing purposes every
so often, so I suspect I'm not the one that Dick is going after.
Since Dick hasn't specified ANY details about who he is having a
problem with, it is pretty hard to know what he's thinking/what the
problem really is, if any.

Whatever he's thinking, the Firenet objects ARE legal to igate to
RF, so if he has a problem with them it must be an RF congestion
issue he's worried about?  If so, perhaps he'll provide actual data
as to how much congestion these objects are causing and who's
igating them to RF.  This would allow us to make an educated
decision as to whether there really is a problem and if so how to go
about helping to solve it.  So far:  No actual data to work from.
Show us actual data.  Give us details.

I consider Firenet to be one of the more advanced APRS things I've
done and am proud of my work there as well as the efforts of several
other programmers and server operators on that list.  I take offense
to those that bad-mouth it.  The sorts of things we do there are
oriented towards the emergency and public services side of ham
radio.  Ham radio is supposed to be about that partially isn't it?

Curt.  Xastir developer, SAR member, Firenet member, generator of
many objects.  All legal.

P.S.  I read with a bit of humor some of the postings, as they talk
about Firenet as if it was breaking ham radio rules or something.
It's not ham radio, so it can't be breaking any rules.  It's
internet-based communication, so if I wanted to put f*ck in every
object (without the '*'), I could.  It's the igates that would need
to filter on that and make sure they didn't get to RF, not me.  Of
course I DON'T do that, so that all of these machine-generated
objects are capable of being gated to RF if someone wishes to do so.

Lots of free advertisement happening here for Firenet this week!
For those that are interested to see what all the hubbub is about,
firenet.us port 2023 will get you a full feed.  Do a google search
for "WA6OFT firenet" to find the other server and a bit of info on
Firenet itself.  It's the same type of feed you'll get off the INET
servers for APRS, and in fact the two are connected, except that the
special Firenet objects don't get gated to the APRS INET.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
  Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"