[aprssig] SATgates ? (again)

[steve at dimse.com]

> On Jan 27, 2016, at 9:50 AM, Paul Bramscher <pfbram at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> Any mode is subject to propagation conditions (and therefore reasonable
> to study), but the APRS-IS de-duping of APRS negates the ease of that.
> 
> There's a naturally resistance from programmers (I am one of them,
> myself) to fundamentally change something they've built, whether or not
> the reasons are valid, so I'd still suggest something like this as a
> compromise:
> 
> Other highly active digital mode software right now (WSJT-X, fldigi,
> etc.) have the ability to flip a switch to "upload spotting information"
> (e.g. to pskreporter.info).
> 
> This sort of functionality could be fairly readily introduced into most
> any APRS client.  It would not change pathing, packets, the current
> de-duping, or any of that.  That behavior could all remain the same.
> But it would upload the spots to a central bucket where the satellite
> operator could view, comprehensively, who's seen a sat packet.

This means an entirely separate system, so ALL satgates would need to switch to be useful and therefore more likely to make things worse than better.

The nice thing about my delay idea is it is entirely optional. All we really need is one IGate author to implement it and then we can promote that one IGate as the best for satellite work. Any IGate in an area with people trying to uplink could be told of the advantages of this one program and would likely switch. Other authors that don't implement the new option (which really is pretty easy to do) would lose users. 

Yes there is reticence among authors, but I've found when someone implements an idea that is likely to cause that program to gain users at the expense of others, the others seem to add the feature pretty quickly.

Steve K4HG