[aprssig] Why Not "Gate in Vicinity"

[Pete Loveall AE5PL Lists]

Those of you who think it is good practice to give over control of your IGate station to an unknown person by enabling "gate to RF any station on APRS-IS within x miles" might be interested in how badly configured some of those "smartphone" apps can be.  VE4HTO-14 is transmitting a beacon from his APRSDroid software every 5 seconds (or faster) which would wipe out any general APRS RF channel and make it unusable if those beacons were gated to RF.  Of course, his email address on QRZ is invalid so there is no way to ask nicely that he reduce the beacon rate.

For you IGate operators, if you interfere with the other operators on the frequency because someone comes into your "gate to RF" range, you are at fault, not the person injecting those packets into APRS-IS.  The person injecting the packets would be helpful by being respectful of the other hams on APRS-IS but it is not a requirement nor can that person always be contacted.  Something to keep in mind.

73,

Pete Loveall AE5PL
pete at ae5pl dot net