[aprssig] New IGate Operator (streaming on UHF or VHF)

[Jim Conrad]

For that to be effective the IGATE would need to have good coverage. 
Mine does not so that would not be a viable method without additional 
DIGIs. It appears my station can hear many of the local DIGIs but 
almost all the RF-IS positions are via those DIGIs not direct to my station.

With the current filters in place and this particular area's network 
loading my gating of limited IS-RF positions is having a negligible 
impact on the local frequency utilization. For the first time I saw 
in my WX3in1 statistics that my station gated IS-RF messages 
yesterday. Hadn't seen that before. If anyone cares over the two 
previous days my IGATE has gated 4905 packets RF to IS, 6 message 
packets IS to RF and 52 position packets IS to RF.

I do like the idea though if I had a location with really good 
coverage to act as a high bandwidth mirror of local activity so there 
would be no impact on the local primary APRS channel. Might try that 
as an experiment on a balloon flight pumping (IGATE to Balloon DIGI 
on discrete VHF/UHF and then out on another discrete) out at a higher 
bandwidth (9600 or 56k). Have to review the rules to see where that's 
legal. UHF only?


At 08:57 AM 1/6/2017, Robert Bruninga wrote:
>The best way to do local IS-to-RF broadcast of lots of activity is 
>to simply use an unused UHF frequency.  Then you are just streaming 
>the data at up to full rate.  Locals can see everything.  And when 
>they are transmitting there, too, they are also seen everywhere. 
>Local mobiles who are moving and want to also be seen on local RF 
>can operate split band, with their TX on 144.39 and their receive 
>side on the UHF channel.  Their radio will then see EVERYTHING the 
>local streaming IGate delivers. There are plenty of  unused PACKET 
>frequencies! A third way is to stream on an unused VHF packet 
>frequency, but keep the stream down at only say 10 packets per minute.