[aprssig] Please,standardize UTF-8 for APRS

[Matti Aarnio]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 12:26:00PM -0400, Robert Bruninga wrote:
> > UTF-8 would be very, very good for everyone involved (including 
> > Sergej), even if your particular character set happens to fit 
> > within 8 
> > bits.
> 
> Can someone do a test to see what the  D7, D700, D710, VX8R and
> HAMHUD  display when they receive a UTF-8 message (in English)
> just to see what kind of backward compatilibty issue would
> result.

Since US-ASCII is codepage 0 subset of UNICODE, you can not distinct
US-ASCII message and UTF-8 encoded ASCII subset using UNICODE message.

The INTERESTING thing are European and Asian texts.

But do not take my word on it, read specifications, ask for demos,
etc.

> Since those radios represent many tens of thousands of existing
> messaging users and probably 99% of all HARDWARE (unchangeable)
> code, it would be nice to see the effect.

They are irrelevant in my opinnion.   You have defined APRS Messaging only
for US-ASCII, and existing hardware does not need to support anything else.

Now if you want us to care about your messaging dream, you get at first
the specification fixed like we have said here, then we can perhaps be
persued to take some interest on it AND device vendors may take some
note as well.  Having around 60 000 characters in your text render engine
does take a bit of memory, of course..  say 32 bytes per each, well.. that
is "only" a bit under 2 MB of Flash memory.  No way to make that with
any 8-bit processor.

> Thanks
> Bob, WB4aPR

73 de Matti, OH2MQK