[aprssig] A short little APRS story - and sob story

[Jason KG4WSV]

On Thu, May 3, 2018 at 5:22 PM, Fred Hillhouse <fmhillhouse at comcast.net> wrote:

> Also, there is at least one APRS application (APRSIS32) that uses the OSM data in the form of tiles.

xastir can talk to a tile server, too. (Even better, xastir can ingest
a shapefile that's converted from the OSM data format, because it's a
vector format that allows offline operation.)

BUT...

There's a big difference in "OSM data" and "tiles from a tile server
that uses OSM data".  There's a fair amount of computational resources
(processing, storage, and network bandwidth) that goes into providing
such a server/service, and there are usually restrictions on the use
of such a service.

For example, there's usually verbiage in the terms of service that
precludes something that would be described as "i'm going to write/run
a script that downloads every tile at every zoom level for <insert
area of interest here>".  There are free services no longer available
because it was just too expensive to give the service away for free.

-Jason
kg4wsv