[aprssig] APRS for JOTA, Everywhere!

[Pete Loveall AE5PL Lists]

Your statements are incorrect.  Tactical callsigns have nothing to do with calling CQ.  The only prior use this year of CQSRVR for a nationwide event was Field Day and the issue was an application failure which was corrected within 30 minutes of notification that there was an issue.  Again, tactical callsigns had NOTHING to do with it.  If you use a tactical callsign with CQSRVR, your will get no information from CQSRVR so you have confirmation that CQSRVR is not accepting your tactical callsign.  If you use a valid callsign, you will get positive response to all of your messages.

Making contacts using non-unique tactical callsigns for JOTA are worthless but if you want to do that, use ANSRVR.  If you want to call CQ to amateur radio stations using your amateur radio callsign, use CQSRVR.

73,

Pete Loveall AE5PL
pete at ae5pl dot net

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robert Bruninga
> Sent: Friday, October 19, 2012 9:24 AM
> 
> You are correct that all HF JOTA stations will definately only use their FCC
> callsigns, but the APRS Tactical Operators at the same site using APRS for a
> back-channel ham radio scout APRS demonstration from the scout sites may
> not.  Some might use tactical calls for their council so that they stand out on
> the map as actual JOTA stations and SCOUT demos instead of just the normal
> SEA-OF-APRS callsigns on the map.  We just don't know...
> some always will, and we should not fail them in their attempt to
> communicate.
> 
> Our APRS call this weekend might be 4RVRS for our 4 Rivers District.
> 
> The last few times we used CQSRVR for general national events, we failed
> because any station using a tactical call got nothing... and we did not know
> why until after the event.  The risk of failure or confusion using a callsign
> exclusive system (CQSRVR) on APRS where tactical calls are used quite
> frequently is just too high and too confusing.