[aprssig] Questions about being both an iGate and digipeater.

[Matthew Schumacher]

Hello all,

I'm a bit new to ham/aprs, but I want to start tracking my airplane so I
decided to setup a digipeater to contribute (I live in Alaska in a place
where I'm 30-40 miles away from the nearest digipeater in one direction
and hundreds of miles the other direction.)

At first I setup both an iGate and a digipeater, but when I was looking
in my logs, I would find situations where I would digipeat and another
station 30 miles south of me would digipeat at the same time, and
quickly enough so that the WIDE number wasn't decremented so the next
hop was transmitted twice, but thankfully not at the exact same time on
the radio.

After seeing that I'm just not seeing a point in being a digipeater and
an Igate at the same time so I disabled the digipeater.  Unless someone
is looking for aprs information on the radio channel why digipeat when
the data is sent to the internet and made available there.

I can see why you would want to digipeat if you didn't have internet
access to get around a hill or cover some other remote dead spot, but
why tie up more RF if everyone is going to look to the internet to pull
up the information.

Am I missing something here are do others feel the same way I do?

schu