[aprssig] "station which heard ... directly on the radio"

[Heikki Hannikainen]

On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 9:27 PM, Kristoff Bonne
<kristoff.bonne at skypro.be> wrote:
> Now, looking at my page on aprs.fi (http://aprs.fi/info/ON1ARF-2) I see
> this:
> Stations heard directly by ON1ARF-2 –
> (...)
> and then some stations, like this one:
> ON4NS-9 1 2013-05-19 12:08:31 2013-05-19 12:08:31 JO11NB > JO11LF       19.6
> km 148°    2013-05-19 12:08:31
>
> I did find this pretty odd so I looked in the "raw messages" for this
> station:
> 2013-05-19 12:08:32 CEST:
> ON4NS-9>UQPTY6,ON7EQ,ON0OST,qAR,ON1ARF-2:`y_.oR9>/`"4F}_"
>
> This does not look to be a "heard directly". It has been digipeated twice
> before reaching my node.

No. The packet here looks like it was not digipeated by any
digipeaters - there are no '*' characters at the end of any
digipeaters. A '*' means that the path element and all previous
elements are "used" ("digipeated by"). Without the digipeated-by bit
set in the callsign the packet is requesting to be digipeated by those
digipeaters.

Originally:

SRCCALL>DSTCALL,DIGI1,DIGI2:content

After being digipeated by DIGI1:

SRCCALL>DSTCALL,DIGI1*,DIGI2:content

Then, after being digipeated by DIGI2:

SRCCALL>DSTCALL,DIGI1*,DIGI2*:content

On APRS-IS, only the last used digipeater is marked with a *, even
though all previous ones also have the "have digipeated" bit set, like
this:

SRCCALL>DSTCALL,DIGI1,DIGI2*:content

I would suspect that the ON1ARF-2 igate has a bad bug - it is not
putting in the * characters to mark used-up digipeater path callsigns.
The igate is running the PyMultimonAPRS iGate which has had some bugs
like this in the past. But no worries, it's just new and needs a
little fixing before reaching perfection.

- Hessu