[Xastir-dev] Weather Alert Test Cases Fail

[Dan Srebnick]

I tried to get in touch with Pete a few weeks back to try to understand
 the current practice but I was unsuccessful.

NWS CAP messages also omit the underscore in the zone/county list.  I'm
totally fine with declaring the current practice the standard.  That
said, it would then be great if the alert.c comments be modified enough
to align with the practice standard, not so much for me at this point,
as for the benefit of future experimenters.

I had made some inquiries around this on aprs-sig but responses
revolved around "why don't you use someone else's alerts instead of
generating your own!"

Curt, thanks for taking time to respond and clarify.  It is just what I
needed!

73, Dan


On Wed, 2017-08-23 at 08:01 -0700, Curt, WE7U wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Aug 2017, Dan Srebnick wrote:
> 
> > I now know why the test cases fail!
> > 
> > There was a "temporary change" made in 2009 that altered Xastir
> > from
> > the standard for counties/zones in order to accommodate viewing of
> > compressed-zone format alerts sent by Pete Loveall, AE5PL's server.
> > 
> > Backing out what appears to have been changed in alert.c and
> > recompiling now allows Xastir to work according to the spec and the
> > test cases succeed.
> > 
> > So is the temporary change necessary any more?  I am generating my
> > own
> > alerts according to the standard and not do use AE5PL's feed.  So I
> > would prefer adhering to the standard.  I've spent a couple dozen
> > hours
> > trying to sort through this because documentation, standards, and
> > reality did not align!
> > 
> > Comments, thoughts please?
> 
> Fun. Well, Pete's alerts and my alerts are the current standard. You
> might try my alerts off the Firenet servers to see if they're being
> received ok. It's likely that we didn't go back and tweak the test
> cases to correspond to the current "standard".
> 
> Dale Huguley generated alerts for many years, so defined the standard
> with those alerts. At some point he retired his server and we had to
> create new ones. Pete came along first and tweaked the format
> slightly, so Xastir and other APRS programs were tweaked to match.
> Sometime after that I wanted more alerts (to get closer to what Dale
> used to generate), so brought up my own server: It fills in some
> alerts that Pete doesn't generate.
>