[aprssig] APRS on Amtrak, DC to Minneapolis

[Gregg Wonderly]

It depends on what does have power.  That’s the important thing about having the ability to transition your communications needs into whatever mode/mechanism is powered.  AX.25 requires very explicit hardware.  That being the only mode used, means that you have to have digipeaters for it to work.  No power means there may be no digipeaters, or since most areas have a few, all of them could be without power.  The implication is that we need more ways to “send” data.  Because APRS is rooted in AX.25 routing mechanisms, we don’t even have experience with other ways to send the “data” we want to communication, other than APRS-IS.   Thus, a “stream” to the internet is the more desirable mechanism to have available.  Going across Fusion, DMR, D-Star and other digital means which might have working repeaters is something that we should know how to do.  Moving over the other digital modes on HF is additionally a necessary thing.  We still have ourselves stuck with “serial ports” to “TNCs” or other emission devices.  

Lots of things need to change, and if we are going to start down the path of change, I would suggest it really is time to look at OpenTrac and/or something much better in expandability and brevity of data than what we have today with the APRS text symbology and data wrapping.  It’s very verbose from the text perspective.  For the same number of bytes, we could send a lot more data…

Gregg Wonderly
W5GGW

> On Jun 6, 2018, at 6:58 AM, Jason KG4WSV <kg4wsv at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Jun 5, 2018 at 5:06 PM, R Kirk <isobar at verizon.net> wrote:
>> They do kind of blur, don't they?
> 
> Not when the power goes out...
> 
> 
> -Jason
> kg4wsv
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