[aprssig] Weather Stations and Net Neutrality

[Steve Dimse]

>
> IMO this one isn't about implementation difficulty as much as
> usability.  A positionless WX packet is useless without other data to
> complete it.

No more so than a piece of telemetry data, a status, or a message. All  
of these (original, as in from Bob) are also "positionless". If you  
follow Bob's line of reasoning, then the only thing that should ever  
be transmitted is a single (not presently defined) message format that  
sends every bit of data about the station in every packet. This is  
clearly ridiculous.

> This should have never been allowed to exist, but I
> assume it's one of those things that some specific piece of hardware
> couldn't do, so the protocol was dumbed down to allow it.

You assume incorrectly, in fact it is the exact opposite. This was  
done to reduce channel congestion, with the slight added expense of a  
little extra code. The protocol was smarted-up! It was done long  
before any of these hardware devices with limited capacity existed.

Steve K4HG