[aprssig] Broken digis (Ohio to Oklahoma and everywhere inbetween)

[James Smith]

As someone that runs 4 digipeaters it easy for everyone here to say you 
need to that you need to do this. Has anyone helped invest in a 
digipeater? if so Thank You!!! I haven't seen any money yet from all the 
users that use my equipment on daily basis and lets not forget when 
Dayton comes around and there is even more users. Trust me, I have allot 
of my own money involved  in building a network of digi's Indiana. Not 
everyone of them  just mine. I have  them set to the new  paradigm 
WIDEn-N , SS stuff. Again, you have to put yourself in the shoes of a 
digipeater owner. Securing good sites nowadays is expensive... Everyone 
will change over eventually, stop gripping already or you may find that 
instead of trying to help the situation you in turn make and worst and 
lose the digipeater all together. P and M too long and people will 
simply switch it off. And for the record I've been around for 12 + years 
on APRS, I've read everything, changed everything when new things came 
down pike. Been there done that and Stan wrote book about it... :) Stan!!!!!

James Smith - K9APR
k9apr at k9apr.org

Rick Green wrote:
> On Sun, 29 Jul 2007, Stan - N0YXV wrote:
>
>>  To my surprise a lot of people think that WIDEn-N is just a short 
>> hand way of writing RELAY, WIDE (or other similar syntax type 
>> confusions).
>
>  OK, maybe I'm one of the ones that needs educating.  I thought that 
> the 'new paradigm' was just getting rid of the myriad of aliases, 
> since most digis supported all of them anyway, and replaced them with 
> a simpler WIDEn-N, where n is the maximum hops requested, and N is the 
> hops remaining.  So RELAY, WIDE becomes WIDE2-2, and RELAY,WIDE,WIDE 
> is WIDE3-3.
>   No big deal.  It saves a few bytes of bandwidth.  It also requires 
> 'smart' digi software, as the hop decrementing isn't implemented in 
> the 'standard' TNC-2 digipeat firmware.  So it can't be implemented 
> everywhere, unless our benevolent dictator of APRS standards is also a 
> sugar daddy that wants to buy us all new hardware as well.
>   I never understood why some people are talking about 
> 'pre-decrementing' the path, and recommending something like WIDE2-1.  
> Since that only allows one more hop, why not save three bytes and just 
> say WIDE?
>
> Better yet, scrap it all, and use a single universal path: APRS.  If 
> you're going to require smart digi software, then put some real smarts 
> in the digi.  Since each packet includes location info as well as 
> whatever other telemetry, let each digi owner define their own 
> 'service area', and digipeat if the packet originated in the service 
> area(and is not a dup!), drop otherwise.  That would totally prevent 
> the lids from trying to 'CQ DX APRS', and give the cross-country 
> travellers a universal path that would work in every neighborhood, 
> without ruffling local feathers if they happen to wander into a dense 
> neighborhood squawking a path that's perfectly suitable to their home 
> on the wide open plains.
>