[aprssig] is there a complete APRS primer out there?

[Steve Noskowicz]

Andrew,
 Well, thats more like a buck three eighty five, but...

  I also needed some help back when I bought a used D700 and found that most sites made a lot of assumptions about prior knowledge. 

 As commonly happens in such cases, I eventually wrote what I has been looking for after time on the net, playing with the radio and reading the mail here.  It is focused on the D700/D7, but I took pains to make it readable for the beginner and as general as I was able. Much of what you mention is more advanced that my Beginner Guide.  I never set up a TNC or Digi, so I have nothing in there about that.

I've received a half dozen or so positive comments about it over the years and some suggestions, as well as one fella who put an older version of it on the very same Yahoo group where I hav it.  Strange fella who blew up at me when I told him I already had it there and suggested he just put a link to the most recent version on my site. It is also scattered about randomly by others.

While Comcast has dropped web hosting so I can't point you to an on-line copy [other than the WayBack Machine and the Yahoo APRS Group], I attach a pdf of it to you direct @ hotmail.  Look it over and if you want to use it as a basis for your document just let me know and I will send the source Word.doc. 

P.S.  Unfortunately APRS is not a modern Plug-n-Play system.  While Bob and others did a wonderful job making it useful, it does take a significant amount of education to get things right, but if you can answer your user's questions that is good. 

I have an ASUS cloud site for my tablet and should move it up there with my book....


-- 
 Regards, Steve Noskowicz, K9DCI
 Science & Technical Advisor
 http://www.challengerillinois.org/

--------------------------------------------
On Tue, 1/5/16, Andrew P. via aprssig <aprssig at tapr.org> wrote:

 Subject: [aprssig] is there a complete APRS primer out there?
 To: "aprssig at tapr.org" <aprssig at tapr.org>
 Date: Tuesday, January 5, 2016, 7:36 PM

 Greetings, all.
 
 I've been receiving complaints/suggestions from my
 software users regarding the difficulty of properly
 configuring an APRS station to "play nicely" with
 others. Does anyone know of a good complete summary for the
 APRS newbie that explains how (and why) they
  should set up their station a particular way so both they
 and other users will have optimal use of the APRS network?
 Things like:
 
 symbol choices,SSID preferences,tocall
 values,propagation, bandwidth, and local capacity
 (aloha limit) issues,
 
 beaconing rates and digipeat paths, especially for
 the special cases of fixed station, mobile station, and
 fixed digipeater announcing Local Information about
 repeaters for mobile users,
 
 transmit power and antenna
 height,geographically where it is good vs. bad to
 deploy a digipeater, Rx-only I-gate, or Tx
 I-gate,special rules for the balloon and rocket
 trackers, and even for ground-based Tx-only trackers,
 
 etc., etc., etc.
 If no one knows of a good document that I can point them
 at, I would like to start composing/compiling one, based on
 the collected (or, more accurately, scattered) wisdom
 we've accrued over the past 20+ years of APRS
 operations. In the latter case, suggestions
  of good partial documents that I can draw upon for wisdom
 would also be appreciated. I'm looking to end up
 with a single document (or small set of linked web
 pages) that isn't product-specific, but applies to all
 vendors and types of hardware and software,
  doing special cases by function (tracker vs. digipeater,
 for example) rather than by specific product instances.
 
 If we can come up with something like this, we should
 then reference it from everywhere to cut down on the
 repeated "How do I set up my station?" requests we
 keep getting because it _is_ difficult to figure out until
 you become a wizard that understands
  in detail the innards of how the network works.
 
 Just my $.02.
 
 Andrew Pavlin, KA2DDO
 author of YAAC ("Yet Another APRS Client")
 http://www.ka2ddo.org/ka2ddo/YAAC.html
 
 
 
 
 
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