[aprssig] Vicinity Plots on APRS

[Randy Allen - KA0AZS]

To give a real world example that ties these two paragraphs together, a few years ago my wife drove to Florida with a TinyTrak set up (Before she got her D700).  Early in the trip the GPS became disconnected.  The TinyTrak was happily transmitting 0X0 at the Smart Beaconing parked rate.

FindU was therefore showing her off the West Coast of Africa.  However, by looking at the Digi that injected her signal into the IS displayed at the top of the FindU screen, I could look that station up and see where she was on her trip, down to at least the city/county level.  Good enough for me.

When I was running APRSDos, I also used vicinity plots to help troubleshoot newbie stations (at least ensuring they were on the air).

Given the odds against a station actually being at 0 Lat/0 Long, should there be a rule to the effect that those positions will be treated as position-less and therefore plotted using the Vicinity protocol? Perhaps a user option?  Or is that already covered in the spec?


73

Randy

-----Original Message-----
>From: Bob Bruninga <bruninga at usna.edu>
>
>> Just imagine if you lived in West Africa and ran this programe 
>> how annoying it would be having all these stations just off the 
>> coast at 0 Lat 0 Long coming and going . 
>
>Yes, that was never intended to happen...
>
>> Why display a station anywhere on a map when it's a guess.
>
>Because the global APRS system is a big place.  But knowing someone
>originated a packet via a given digi, nails down the stations position in
>the network (for communications purposes) 99.99999% from about 6 million to
>1.


Randy Allen, KA0AZS