[aprssig] South/central virginia and Tennessee
Robert Bruninga
bruninga at usna.edu
Thu Jun 19 11:45:23 EDT 2008
> Looks like a rogue mobile on RF...
> It came through our area about 4 days ago....
Stephen, ah, glad to find someone in the area. I hope I can
enlist you to incite some progress on the digipeatrs in the
area.
I was disappointed during my 300 mile drive along I-81
surrounded by digipeaters on mountains on both sides for 5 hours
not to ever see once, a recommended voice repeater object show
up on my APRS radio. I appologize if there was one and I missed
it. But the digipeaters in that area are missing a great
opportunity to the amateur radio mobile public.
Every APRS digipeater is responsible for 3 things:
1) Digipeating local actiivty
2) Announcing its New-N capabilities
3) Transmitting the locally recommended VOICE repeater FREQUENCY
object for mobiles in its immediate footprint.
Bottom line. APRS is an INFO distribution system! If a mobile
is in range of ANY APRS digipeater, then his APRS system should
show three things:
1) Packets from all local activity
2) Information on the digi's capabilities
3) The recommended Voice Frequency in that immediate area.
I ask that all digipeater owners in the country get motivated to
complete this third aspect of the New-N paradigm. Please read
all about it. Just Google the words "APRS localinfo" without
the quotes.
I think Eastern Tenessee was also rather bleak and there is no
New-N support through Knoxville I think. Here are my recent
tracks. If anyone knows how to get a different scale eeastern
USA map from FINDU, let me know. All I can find is the USA map.
http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/track.cgi?call=wb4apr-9&geo=usa.geo
&start=1000
On that link you can see the gaps around Knoxville and Eastern
Ohio. We need to educate the country that although RF APRS is a
purely 100% local RF system, that it does have responsibility to
transitent mobiles as part of a national system.
Clubs (even without any APRS members) should be embarassed to
have their area be a black hole to the motoring amateur radio
public.
Can we build up a map of black holes and appeal to the national
ham radio community to fill them even if they don't use APRS?
That is why I feel that integrating LOCAL voice freqeucny info
on APRS is so important. It makes the local ham (non-aprs)
aware of APRS every time an APRS use comes up on a visiting
repeater and says "I saw your repeater on APRS, thought I'd
check in..." That may be the first visiting mobile to check in
to that repeater in a week! So many of them have PL's that
without this local info LIVE, it is hard to visit these days...
Thanks, Bob, WB4APR
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