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

[Randy Love]

Wow.
Of all places, I would have thought that Alaska would be the one were you
would be wanting *more* RF coverage.

If you turn your digipeater on, you extend the coverage of that digi 30
miles way into your area, allowing the local RF only user to benefit from
the data. Everybody thinks that APRS is only about tracking someone/thing
via the internet. It ain't.... that's just the part that most people are
aware. APRS is much, much more to those that use it to message, query
information, and for overall situational awareness.

Now, if you were in say, Baltimore/DC, I say that  you would need to
evaluate the need for another digi, but in Alaska, where your nearest digi
is 30-40 miles way, turn it on. The packets transmitting at the same time is
an expected operation in APRS to ensure that the information is propagated
without being duplicated in the same area.

Randy
WF5X


On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 9:41 PM, Matthew Schumacher <schu at schu.net> wrote:

> 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
>
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