[aprssig] Re: APRS radios

[Chris Kantarjiev]

>  But please don't 
> delude yourself or anyone else into thinking that APRS is 'simple' to 
> implement properly.

Implementation issues aside (and that's a big leap), a core
problem is that *there is no spec* that accurately describes
the system, and there is certainly no sort of formal acceptance
suite or criteria.

Beyond the basics, everyone has made it up as they went along,
and the only documentation is code that may or may not be
available in source.

I ran into the difficulty when I was writing code to parse
on-the-air packets in perl! The "spec" on the tapr website
is incomplete and out of date, but there is nothing better.
I resorted to using bit tweezers on the packet stream from
a local high-and-wide digi. 

I'd like to write some code that posts objects showing traffic
incidents. The data is available in the public domain, more or less,
but the details of managing objects (in particular, how to remove
them and what various clients and igates do with them) is highly
obscure. I finally gave up after staring at various implementations
for a month.

The horse is out of the barn now, of course; we're pretty 
unlikely to recover from the current state of confusion unless
there is a concerted effort for 5 years or more. And that
seems pretty unlikely.

73 de chris K6DBG