[aprssig] UTF-8 for APRS (testing)

[Heikki Hannikainen]

On Tue, 22 Sep 2009, Stephen H. Smith wrote:

> Robert Bruninga wrote:
>> OK, but what about how it "works"?

Yeah, I think we're generally interested in that it doesn't completely 
crash, or flood the network, or something like that. If it behaves a 
little odd, it doesn't matter.

>> 2) does it properly ACK the message
>
> Again, The UTF-8 test "robot" is NOT a full APRS client.

I guess a valid test would be to see that the device sends a correct ACK 
for the message, if the message contains a message ID in the end. If UTF-8 
was not backwards compatible (which it is :), some device might not find 
the ID, and might not send an ack, and the station sending the message 
might continue to retransmit the message.

We can check this from the raw packets log. What is the callsign/SSID of 
your Kenwood in this test?

>> 3) Will it properly REJect the message if full,
>
> WHAT is supposed to reject the message if full?

Some devices can reject the message, if they're out of message memory. I 
guess this falls in the same category as the previous one - is the 
message-id parsed correctly after some UTF-8 data.

>> 4) can you "edit" the message... Etc.
>
> Huh?   It's an incoming message originated by a robot autoresponder.  Why 
> would I be editing it?  I'm receiving it; not sending it.

Right. No point here at all.

>> 5) Do intermediate Igates see it as a valid message and pass it
>> to RF?
> Again, a  look at the RF test part of the web page shows that the request 
> from a D700 on RF to the Internet (via an igate)  and response (from 
> Internet back to RF via an igate)  successfully made it.

Most igates will probably pass it. If one of them doesn't, it doesn't 
really matter, since we're interested in fixing them. And if someone isn't 
interested in fixing them, they're probably living in a mostly 
English-speaking area, and English will still go through just fine.

>> 6) Does it get captured in the message list on the various APRS
>> internet servers

Seems to do, although aprs.fi needs to be fixed to show UTF-8 correctly.

> Earlier (European) posters in this thread had said these strings displayed 
> properly on the Euro version of the D700.

They were referring to other non-UTF-8-strings, which were not 
transmitted by the UTF-8 robot. You might be able to get scandinavian 
letters through to a D700 or ui-view or some other existing software, by 
transmitting in the exactly correct charset (iso-8859-1 or -15, shift-jis, 
etc), but you need to make sure that (1) that character set includes the 
required character, and that (2) the transmitting and receiving device 
are using the same character set. (3) Many of those character sets are not 
backwards compatible with ASCII like UTF-8 is.

   - Hessu