[aprssig] New icon images

[Heikki Hannikainen]

On Thu, 21 Aug 2014, andrewemt wrote:

> Greetings, all.
> 
> I was just reading some archives of the mailing list, and came upon the discussion last year of defining new APRS
> symbol code meanings and creating new symbol icon images.
> 
> Has any progress been made on that?

I've mostly finished the work on a new symbol set. I'll release it first 
on aprs.fi (pretty soon), and then open-source the data. The new ones look 
pretty good on modern displays, even when rotated as bitmaps:

https://twitter.com/aprsfi/status/502348470465097728


That effort, however, only targeted the old symbol set, and none of the 
new ones, mostly because drawing a lot of additional symbols takes a lot 
of additional time, and it took a lot of time to just do the old ones 
(some 30-50 minutes per symbol! and could easily use more to make them 
better). I'm not quite sure it makes sense to put a lot of effort in a 
huge granularity of different symbol graphics like this:

HOUSE: #-
/- = House
\- = (was HF)
5- = 50 Hz mains power
6- = 60 Hz mains power

... are there any areas where one house has 50 Hz and the next house 
suddenly has 60 Hz? What is the relevancy of this?

B- = Backup Battery Power
C- = Club, as in Ham club
E- = Emergency power
G- = Geothermal
H- = Hydro powered
O- = Operator Present
S- = Solar Powered
W- = Wind powered

... huh? 9 more houses to draw, while somehow signaling which sort of 
power source each house has? Will there also be a separate for a 
Hydro-powered house which has an operator present, VHF yagi antenna and a 
dog?

I'd suggest this sort of granularity and detail could go to the free-form 
comment text. We'll need to hire a full-time symbol graphic artist if we 
go to details like this. :)

The "generalize old symbols" direction would be more useful. Like when the 
current symbolsX.txt redefines \h, which used to be 'ham store', as just 
'store', which is more widely useful.

   - Hessu