[aprssig] Weather Stations and Net Neutrality

[Bob Bruninga]

> So the wx telemetry transmitted every 5-minutes 
> but the APRS station "beacon", showing 
> [the WX station ]location, callsign, symbol, 
> etc would only transmit every 30-minutes. 
> It was a fixed location and did not need to beacon
> more often than twice an hour.  We adopted that 
> philosophy to all fixed stations.

And this positionless Weather is the most frustrating kluge on APRS since it was first proposed in 1995!  It drives me nuts!  It violates the fundamental principles of APRS that each packet is self-contained and does not depend on aprior info to make sense.  

These positionless weather reports from fixed stations that only send their position once an hour or even once every 30 minutes means that their 5 minute WX data is useless to anyone for up to 30 minutes or an hour.

The APRS format for WX is the "complete" format.  We were only forced to incorporate the "positionless weather" and "weatherless-WX-position" format because it was implemented in another popular client. 

Please, No more positionless weather, and no more FIXED-PATH for-all paths.  PROPORTIONAL PATHING is the idea solution to latency and loading issues.  If we are stuck with 5 minute WX engines, then Make 5 minute packets simplex direct.  Then once every 10 minutes make them one hop.  THen once every 20 minutes make them two hops.

THe ideal PIC project would be to plug in a 5 minute WX statioin into an 8 Watt Microtrack or Tinytrack, or Opentraker so that it converted the WX data to the APRS native WX format and also implements Proportional Pathing.

Done.

Bob, Wb4APR