[aprssig] APRS to the planet rescue?

[Scott Miller]

Throwing a bunch of uncalibrated sensors out there with no standards for 
their placement is not going to get you much useful data.  It might be 
fun to look at your own track and see where you get hot spots but it's 
not going to do serious researchers much good.

And didn't we discuss a standardized type-length-value extension scheme 
a while back?  Aside from OpenTRAC, that is.  At the very least I think 
any more extensions to the format need a formal definition, maybe a BNF 
grammar, to guarantee that everything is unambiguous and parseable.

Scott
N1VG

On 4/3/2017 7:56 AM, Robert Bruninga wrote:
>
> Here's a project.  Add a $4 Methane detector to your APRS mobile and 
> help us find the bad methane leaks.  Google is adding it to their 
> maping cars.  Maybe Amateur Radio and APRS could help?
>
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/15b2521854ccaa63
>
>
> Apparently the 2:1 advantage of replacing the high carbon emissions of 
> coal with natural gas, overlooks the fact that the methane released 
> with natural gas extraction methods is 84 times worse than carbon as a 
> green house gas and may more than offset any advantages.
>
> Just one methane leak a few years ago did more damage than about a 
> million cars a day before it was plugged months later
>
> .http://www.businessinsider.com/methane-gas-leak-porter-ranch-los-angeles-disaster-largest-in-history-2016-1
>
> Anyway, a $4 sensor and a tiny processor could add a flag to our 
> mobile packets somehow  when levels exceeded some background level
>
> Though I am not sure if the sensitivity of these $4 sensors is good 
> enough to find the outdoor area low level leaks, or only detects high 
> concentrations...
>
> I wish I had the time to make one and experiment with the concept. It 
> would make a great fun project. I used to thing a cheap radiation 
> detector would let APRS contribute to plotting radiation hot spots, 
> but I fear the natural gas leaks and fracking damage is going to kill 
> us first.
>
> My thoughts on adding this to APRS is to simply have a processor send 
> out a modified STATUS text when a detection is made.  Since APRS was 
> designed around the status being merged-on-receipt with the most 
> recent posit, this is a way of nailing down the location of high 
> methane levels or leaks.
>
> Status could simply be >CH4=XXX where XXX is the reading. Format of 
> XXX will be determined to  give reasonable scale over expected 
> detections.  Then the APRS map could selectively plot any detections.
>
> Anyone have more experience with these sensors and the levels of 
> detections expected?
>
> Bob, wb4apr
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> aprssig mailing list
> aprssig at tapr.org
> http://www.tapr.org/mailman/listinfo/aprssig

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.tapr.org/pipermail/aprssig_lists.tapr.org/attachments/20170403/260e5fc2/attachment.html>