[aprssig] Aeronautical Mobile Best Practices?

[Heikki Hannikainen]

On Sun, 29 May 2011, Joe Dubner wrote:

> 3.  Don't use MIC-E; use plain ASCII.  This doesn't take a lot of extra
> bandwidth  considering all the wasted bits with extra flags for TxD,
> etc. but makes troubleshooting long-delayed packets a whole lot easier.
> In addition, not all MIC-E packets are decoded correctly; my error
> logs are filled with things like: "Parsing failed: Invalid characters in
> mic-e information field (mice_inv_info)"  Just today there were a couple
> dozen of these and other errors reported by the FAP.pm parser.

Mic-E generally works fine - I would not make such a recommendation!

Are you running parseaprs with the accept_broken_mice option? If not, try 
that. It makes FAP.pm accept most if not all Mic-E packets which have been 
broken by buggy aprsd versions (the recent ones included in up-do-date 
Debian/Ubuntu systems have been fixed, by the way).

parseaprs("OH2XYZ>APRS,RELAY*,WIDE:!2345.56N/12345.67E-PHG0123 hi",
            \%hash, ’accept_broken_mice’ => 1);

If accept_broken_mice does not help, it would be useful to see the packets 
which fail parsing. UTC timestamp and transmitting callsign is enough, I 
can pick them up from the raw packets table. It could be a new bug in 
either the transmitter encoding the packets, or FAP.pm, and it would be 
good to fix any bugs instead of just abandoning Mic-E and increasing 
channel usage unnecessarily.

   - Hessu