[aprssig] RFC: Requirement Specification for APRS Digipeater and IGate

[Matti Aarnio]

I have succeeded in writing a decent Receive-Only (never transmit) APRS
IGate software for those who can not put a bidirectional system online for
any number of reasons (like license issues on Britain), and where existing
well known competitors are difficult or very difficult to configure.

In order to extend that to a few other things where existing technology is
so bad that a replacement is necessary,  I have begun to write a Requirement
Specification  document for software that handles following things:

  - Receive-Only IGate
  - Transmit-Only IGate
  - Bidirectional IGate
  - Digipeater on single frequency with single radio/TNC
  - Digipeater on single frequency with multiple receivers/Rx-TNC:s, and
    few(er) transmitters
  - Cross-band digipeating
  - Digipeaters on multiple frequencies, single or multiple receivers
    at each, single or multiple transmitters at each
  - IGate and digipeating

.. and all that with easy to use configuration language.
(99% of users can not be bothered read lengthy theory-of-operation
explanations, before they can get the system to run -- we have serious
documentation problem here...   Configuration expressiveness and its
easyness are often conflicting things.)

The Request For Comments considers following document:

  http://repo.ham.fi/svn/aprx/trunk/doc/aprx-requirement-specification.pdf

While it says "aprx...", it really is about general IGate, and Digipeater
requirements all combined into one.

Could you give feedback on technical merits / lack thereof, and not so much
of myself being non-native english speaker whose native language lacks
articles, and gender identification, and who thefore is making mistakes on
those :)

Like IEEE Standards papers, I have numbered every text line for easier
referral, and each page carries also version id on header.

Do not worry that the platform for this software needs to be more than
ancient TAPR TNC2.  Meaning of today's "embedded processor" is quite
different, than what those old Z80 boxes did back in 1980es.
Heck, 1000+ MIPS 32-bit scalar power means one can do complicated Viterbi
modems in software, and still be mainly idle!

This software can do deep packet inspection and analysis, parse position
data, and do location analysis to determine of "will I digipeat this?"

Looking at things on Digi_Ned, it has some neat things (report DX to
DX service), and things which really are not something a digipeater
should do at all (track satellites).  It does even parse position info
from packets for that DX-thing, but it is not available to digipeater
filter decission.

Wiki article on the current Aprx software (english):

  http://wiki.ham.fi/Aprx.en


73 de Matti, OH2MQK,  oh2mqk at sral.fi  (oh2mqk at arrl.net)