[aprssig] Please, standardize UTF-8 for APRS

[Stephen H. Smith]

Joel Maslak - N7XUC wrote:
> I am all for this.  One caution - we need to define max message length 
> I'm BYTES not characters!
>
> Also, we may need a way of specifying text direction (right to left or 
> vertical or whatever)
>
> On Sep 21, 2009, at 8:24 AM, Heikki Hannikainen <hessu at hes.iki.fi> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 21 Sep 2009, Sergej wrote:
>>
>>> Will be enough 8bit chars set to include regional subsets.
>>> But for Chinese or Japan hams possible UTF-x encoding is better?
>>
>> UTF-8 would be very, very good for everyone involved (including 
>> Sergej), even if your particular character set happens to fit within 
>> 8 bits.
>>

Is this going to be practical AT ALL  within the existing APRS 
framework?   


Currently the APRS message string length is limited to 60-70 bytes (i.e. 
classic APRS ASCII characters).   If one starts using UTF-8, you may be 
using 3-4-5 bytes per character, reducing the effective length of a 
message to only 15-20 non-western characters.  Is this going to be 
enough be useful for anything?      Consider especially an APRS-to-email 
message.   By the time you express the "name at server.domain" email 
address, there will practically NO space for the message.


Not to mention the difficulty of entering these on DTMF pads on Kenwood 
radios.  (Is it even possible ?).  [Not that I really care.  I think 
entering even US ASCII text on a cellphone numeric keyboard is a 
perverse masochistic exercise. I refuse to do any kind of text comms on 
less than a full computer keyboard!] 

It would appear that until the Kenwood radios fade from the APRS scene 
that it will be really difficult to incorporate UTF-anything into the 
present patchwork "kludge" of improvised workarounds and expedients for 
the limitations of old packet hardware.   


Any extension that could incorporate UTF-8, longer text strings, more 
robust encoding and error correction, etc will be so utterly different 
from the present APRS protocols that I don't think it should be called 
"APRS" at all. 


Perhaps we should call it "AP-3G"  or "AM-LTE" .........




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Stephen H. Smith    wa8lmf (at) aol.com
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