[aprssig] APRS Event Bulletin Board

[Heikki Hannikainen]

On Fri, 4 Apr 2008, Robert Bruninga wrote:

>> Last night I added bulletin group filtering
>> on the bulletin board page at aprs.fi:
>> http://aprs.fi/bulletin/ . Events can be seen at
>> http://aprs.fi/bulletin/EVENT...
>
> Great.  Thanks.  How does it know "within 500 miles of my
> location" when I am just browsing on the internet?  Do I need to
> ID somewhere?

   At first it makes an educated guess based on your IP address. It's not a 
very accurate procedure, but works well enough for most users to get them 
to a familiar spot on the map. It does make some obvious mistakes (like 
assuming that employees of Nokia Corporation are all in the city of Nokia, 
Finland). Once you look at the map, open up the Options window and use the 
"Save current map view as default view", it'll remember the preferred 
center point of the map and use that as "your location".

> If this gets popular, I wonder it there could be other sub
> categories of bulletins.
> I couild imagine things like this being used:
> BLN#HFNET
> BLN#MDNOW  <== for state of Maryland and a live event

> So maybe, SORTING and GROUPTING by the actual BULLETIN group
> might be another way to discriminate these.

   Exactly. The bulletin group list on that page is dynamic. Just transmit 
a bulletin with a new group string and it'll appear on the page. If you 
decide to use BLN#HFNET in a new bulletin, http://aprs.fi/info/HFNET will 
show it, and HFNET will suddenly appear in the "select a specific bulletin 
group" list.

   - Hessu, OH7LZB