[aprssig] APRS protocol replacement ideas: protobuf

[Heikki Hannikainen]

On Sat, 12 Feb 2022, Stephen H Smith via aprssig wrote:

> All the Japanese and Chinese radios that "do APRS" exclusively use the 
> Mic-E coding format for automatic beaconing, even if they can't do the 
> burst-on-unkey on voice transmissions.

Not *all*, but most. At least some of the cheap Chinese radios send plain 
APRS positions. One of them by default used the TOCALL assigned to 
APRSdroid instead of requesting a tocall of their own.

Yaesu and Kenwood do Mic-E.

> "Deprecating" the Mic-E format would render virtually ALL existing
> radios with built-in APRS functionality useless for APRS.

The "deprecation" would just be a document saying "please don't do this or 
that when generating packets in new implementations, it's not the best way 
to do it these days, please use this other format instead".  Guidance to 
use better formats (compressed) in the future.

Nobody in their right mind would suggest dropping decoders for this rather 
large fleet of existing radios.

   - Hessu