[aprssig] Future Concept for APRS (NOT Tracking only)

[Heikki Hannikainen]

I disagree about a lot of stuff, but in the interest of improving APRS 
messaging, I'm only going to concentrate on this point:

On Mon, 21 Sep 2009, Robert Bruninga wrote:

>> Besides, the most popular and most affordable
>> APRS devices can only do tracking. The messaging-
>> capable rigs are still a bit expensive.
>
> But we are talking about the FUTURE of APRS, not the simplistic
> lowest common denominator.  And most of the problems we see
> today are because of people taking simplistic short-cuts to
> minimum functionality and not fully implementing the protocol
> properly.

Now, on aprs.fi, about 40% of the visits last month were done by users who 
prefer to use it in English. The other 60% used another language (say, 
Finnish - http://fi.aprs.fi/, or French - http://fr.aprs.fi/). 100% of the 
visitors used UTF-8, since all aprs.fi pages are served to you in UTF-8. 
Let's talk about the future (UTF-8) and the lowest common denominator 
(ASCII).

If you're going to want that 60% to use messaging, messaging needs to 
support the other languages well. The standard way to do this on the other 
networks today is UTF-8. It works, and it works pretty well.

This message, which contains some japanese here (日本語) is written and 
transmitted in UTF-8. All those of you who cannot read the Japanese part 
because you only have ASCII terminals can still read the English parts. 
This, sort of, proves that UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII.

If messaging does not support my language, or the languages of 60% of the 
users of my software, I don't care about messaging. The protocol 
specification has broken it for me with a draconian decision by someone 
behind the ocean. :)    Shall we change that?

   - Hessu