[aprssig] Question abt recommended path

[Stephen H. Smith]

jmm at jwmoen.com wrote:

> This question will demonstrate my lack of knowledge, but I know I need 
> some education.  I am a user of APRS and don't run a digipeater.  I 
> have a Kenwood D700 and GPS in my car and have successfully used the 
> path RELAY,WIDE2-2.  I got an APRS message suggesting RELAY was 
> obsolete, so I searched the archives of this list.  Here is what (I 
> think) I learned:
>  
>  
>
>  
> Here's where I'm going to show my ignorance.  I changed the path to 
> APRS, WIDE2-2.  Not only would the local digipeater not repeat me, 
> but when I drove close to other digipeaters that repeated me with my 
> old path, those stopped repeating me with the new path.
>  
> So I changed it to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-2.  Now it looks like all 
> digipeaters that hear me, including W6CX-3, will now repeat my location. 
>  
> My dumb question:  is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-2 an OK path, and if not, what do 
> you experts recommend for my relatively densely populated location? 
>  
>  


The first hop (WIDE1-1) is the replacement for the now-obsolete "RELAY"; 
i.e. requesting a nearby home station to digipeat your first hop into 
the network.  In California, the WIDEs are mostly situated on high 
mountaintops 1000's of feet above the users.  Normally, no RELAY or 
equivalent is required to reach a WIDE here.   Users can easily hit 
mountain top WIDE digis directly almost anywhere in California.  The 
optimum path would be simply WIDE2-2 or WIDE3-3 .     

"APRS" is the destination (not part of the path) and will accomplish 
nothing by being placed in the path, except to prevent you from getting 
digipeated at all since no digi is going to respond to the alias "APRS" 
as a digipeat hop rather than a destination.    

There is some confusion about this due to the quirky way the UI-View 
program has the user enter both the destination address AND the path 
into a single setup field in the program.  This is an idiosyncracy of 
UI-View;  all other programs and hardware devices (TinyTrak, D700, etc) 
have separate fields or menu entries for the PATH and the UNPROTO 
destination.

[ The destination address is a quasi-callsign that normally begins with 
AP and can have up to 4 other characters after AP.   Normally, a three 
or four letter code indicating the program & version, or particular 
model hardware is appended to AP.  Your Kenwood should be sending 
something like "APK001" as the "UNPROTO Address".  If this destination 
doesn't begin with AP, most APRS programs and APRS digipeaters will 
ignore the packet.  This convention was established in the early days of 
APRS when it was often operated on channels shared with traditional 
connected packet. The APxxxx "destination" provided an easy way to 
ignore other packet activity on the channel.  ]




Stephen H. Smith             wa8lmf (at) aol.com
                                                    
Home Page:                   http://wa8lmf.com

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