[aprssig] APRS Radiation sensor

[Guido Trentalancia]

A couple of clarifications...

On Wed, 2011-03-23 at 14:34 +0100, Guido Trentalancia wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-03-22 at 20:59 -0600, KA7O wrote:
> > Mmmmm, looks like it's not a totally 'new' idea.
> > 
> > Any way to take advantage of this?
> > 
> > http://www.radiationnetwork.com/
> 
> Hello,
> 
> originally I have suggested to add this field for weather.

The advantage of having that as a weather parameter (original proposal)
would be that existing (firmware-upgradeable) stations could be more
easily extended to support it. For example, Kenwood TM-D710 has already
icons and fields for weather while perhaps it doesn't understand
telemetry.

> The website you mention in only local to USA, while APRS is global. But
> apart from that (the network you mention could be easily extended to a
> global reach), such website does not propagate the information outside
> of the public Internet, while APRS can propagate the information on RF.
> 
> Of course, what you mention could be used to have more measurements
> (provided that their license allows the data to be used/re-published and
> provided that APRS stations close to those measurement points have
> access to the Internet and *HTTP/image processing capabilities*, which
> is not always the case).

In practice you need something like OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
for reading out numeric values out of an image (that's JPEG !). This is
not something very easy and cheap.

And add all the disadvantages of information coming from only one
centralized source. If the Internet goes down (not very likely but still
possible) or the website goes down (quite likely), then everything goes
tits up.

> 73,
> 
> Guido IZ6RDB
> 
> 
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