[aprssig] aprssig Digest, Vol 191, Issue 22

[Steve Dimse]

> I do though have some of the old guy perspective.... 

Oh Boy! I love reading old guy perspectives. I love giving them more! I could write 100,000 words on this. I'll try to be more brief though...
> 
> How about the big APRS Working Group meeting where only a few authors could or were allowed to attend?  

See, this is the problem with Old Man Perspective, it gets mangled by the Alzheimers...

If there ever was a big APRS WG meeting, I either wasn't invited or forgot about it.

Perhaps you are thinking of that time in April of 99 when a handful of APRS people (me, Keith Sproul of Mac/WinAPRS, and Bob) met with the president and VP of TAPR in Baltimore to hash out very nasty disputes between me and Bob and Bob and TAPR. At the time Bob licensed all the other APRS software authors and required licensing fees, meaning no free APRS programs. His contract with the Sprouls was exclusive, meaning there could be no other Windows, X-Windows, or Macintosh APRS. I had refused to sign a license for javAPRS and the APRS Internet System, and I objected to the way a new author was being treated as he tried to write his software. (My recollection is this was Roger of UIView, but I'm not certain.) There also was considerable tension between Bob and TAPR, because we (I was a board member at the time) had just come out with a product called the Pic-E, an experimenter's version of the Mic-E. Bob received royalties for the Mic-E and felt the Pic-E should pay too. There were a series of very nasty exchanges (most of the nastiness by a younger and more aggressive me). It is all in the TAPR archives, April 99 is a doosey - Don't miss the "Follow the Money" missive, still one of my favs. Every once in a while I read that month just to remind myself what a bastard working in the ER had made me. Quitting medicine and becoming a park ranger cured me, mostly. 

Out of that meeting (again, just five people in a Baltimore hotel conference room) came the plan to create the APRS Working Group and write a spec. Bob agreed at the meeting to allow anyone to write royalty-free APRS software. That was what the meeting was about. It was a nasty time, and anyone that wasn't there missed nothing!

To the best of my recollection, what little the APRS WG did after its creation was all by email. If I forgot something please refresh my memory!

> Scott Miller and OpenTrac was probably ahead of its time...  maybe now is the time???  Probably it even needs to be updated.
> 
I have always opposed a new protocol. To understand why just look at amateur digital voice. P25, YSF, D*Star, and all the flavors of DMR (DMR+, Brandmeister, TGIF, etc.). Is this really the way we want APRS to go?

If you decide to pursue this I will give you one piece of advice, in the form of a true story. Way back in 1996 when I decided to create an internet system to gather data from RF APRS nets around the country, I started to design a new and elegant protocol to carry the data. After a few weeks I showed it to Keith Sproul (MacAPRS) and he said I was nuts - just send the text that comes out the TNC. He already had the parser for it, and with Apple's Communication Toolbox he literally had to do nothing to support the APRS IS other than bundle a telnet text tool Apple already supplied. Other authors supported it with minimal effort. Best of all I had to do less to create the hub software. This is the best advice I was ever given about anything. The point is you get no credit among the users for elegant designs - they just want something that works. APRS works now. If you want to draw people away from the current APRS you need to provide something of value to them, not just more elegance under the hood. Concentrate on the value added before you start to worry about elegance. 

> Bob being "final authority"...  thats interesting and possibly telling how we arrived here....

Not "possibly telling", it is exactly how we got here. All the good, and all the bad. I've had some real knock-down-drag-outs with Bob over the years but he is the most creative ham I know. Like all creative types, he isn't the best at editing himself. Some of his ideas are brilliant, others are horrible. He does not always tell them apart. Sometimes I've taken on the task of telling him when his ideas are bad or even destructive, sometime I've let them run their course. But ever since I saw his kludged satellite with its metal measuring tape antennas, literally basking in the glow of the space shuttle Discovery in the Smithsonian, I have to acknowledge his genius. 

Bob created APRS. His dedication to backward capability grew APRS and kept it as a single reasonably cohesive unit for nearly thirty years. That does give him some authority.

Finally, do not underestimate the effort of updating the protocol. It took us months to write it, and most of the errors are the result of the impossibility of keeping seven or eight people, all of who have real jobs, moving forward. That it exists at all is a testament to the superhuman effort of Ian Wade. If you want to make this an open process where everyone can contribute, the effort will dwarf Ian's contribution.

Steve K4HG