[Xastir] Default digipath

[Curt Mills, WE7U]

On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, Neil Morris wrote:

> It's a tricky thing to get right really... round here (just North of London)
> most people use TRACE3-3.

Really?  That's used only for debug and testing around here.  It's
frowned upon big-time for normal use.  The reason is that your
packets get longer and longer as they go along, meaning they use up
more and more airtime.


> On the South Coast I believe they usually use
> variations on WIDEn-n.

That's what we use around here (near Seattle, WA), but we now
recommend "WIDE-WIDEn-N" so that we can figure out the entry point
for each packet into the network.  The first "WIDE" will get filled
in with a real callsign.  We pay a slight penalty in packet length
in order to be able to trace a packet back back to it's entry point
into the network.


> People in rural areas might well need RELAY.

That's the category I fell into for a while, until APRS got more
popular in my county.  I used to run "RELAY,WIDE4-4" in my mobile as
well.  Now it's "RELAY,WIDE3-3" and I'll be changing it to
"RELAY,WIDE2-2" as soon as I get a chance.


> I can't
> really think of an ideal compromise :-|

Yea.  To make matters worse there's the Los Angeles basin, where
they've recommended turning off all RELAY digipeating.  Mobiles
coming into the area with RELAY,WIDE or similar don't have a chance
to get digipeated at all.  Other areas of the U.S. don't have
WIDEn-N digipeaters at all, so you have to use RELAY,WIDE,WIDE,WIDE
or WIDE,WIDE,WIDE depending on whether they have turned off RELAY in
that area.  I think there are some areas down south where they've
also turned of RELAY on their high mountaintops.

Isn't this fun!

At least around the pacific northwest we've "standardized" on the
WIDEn-N digipeaters.  Makes things a bit easier and less congested.
This is a busy area for APRS.

-- 
Curt Mills, WE7U                    hacker_NO_SPAM_ at tc.fluke.com
Senior Methods Engineer/SysAdmin
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