[Xastir] What does "local" mean?

[Curt Mills, WE7U]

On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, Jack Twilley wrote:

> Doesn't the asterisk indicate the station which performed the
> transmission?  The station in question is a digipeater six miles away
> so I expected it to show up as a local station.

Nope.  Unfortunately, with the advent of these generic APRS calls,
you have to dig further.  When you have something like:


    WE7U*>APRS,WIDE3-3,WIDE:Something


It means it came from WE7U.  When you have this instead:


    WE7U*>APRS,WIDE3-2,WIDE:Something


It means that one of the wide-area digipeaters sent it out (the
first digipeater in the path in this case).  There's no asterisk in
this case on the last station that sent it.  Makes it a bit harder
to determine who's local and who's not.

I believe when that field decrements all the way and the next one
takes over, the "digipeated" bit will get set, so it would appear
like this:


    WE7U*>APRS,WIDE3-1*,WIDE:Something

or like this:

    WE7U>APRS,WIDE3-1*,WIDE:Something


Depending on which type of TNC is receive it (some put an asterisk
for every "digipeated" bit that is set, some put one only on the
last one).

When I looked at this a few weeks ago, I decided that I'd need to
add another flag to the record to indicate whether the station was
heard locally (as opposed to heard via TNC).  I think I might have
added that to the record, but haven't added the extra parsing yet to
set that value or to do something with it on display.  As you can
see, it's not quite trivial.

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