[aprssig] Interesting APES sideeffect

[Steve Dimse]

On Dec 14, 2013, at 7:20 PM, qrv at kd4e.com wrote:

> Perhaps the ARRL can recommend igate ops callsign & if that's
> ignored get a FCC rule?
> 
> It's kind of ridiculous for anything to ever go out over the
> air without the last-op's callsign attached - an unhelpful
> in Ham-related traffic even if over the Internet.

No, it isn’t ridiculous. The APRS-IS lies completely outside FCC Part 97 jurisdiction. But even if we were talking about the RF side, there is no requirement to append the callsign to every outgoing packet. In practice messages from RF do have the transmitting IGate’s callsign because they are sent with the third party format, but that is a design decision, not one done to meet rules. Still every day millions of transmissions are relayed on RF without the callsign of the relayer attached to each message, in full compliance with FCC rules.

Every time you talk on a repeater your “messages” are relayed without the repeater callsign attached to each message. The repeater must identify itself every 10 minutes by rule, not with every message. The same thing applies to the digipeaters - every 10 minutes, not every packet. 

To propose the APRS-IS follow stricter requirements than RF is what I think is ridiculous, especially when the goal is to get APRS to do something it wasn’t designed to do, and cannot accomplish even with the change. 

Steve K4HG