[Xastir] Re: Why do I only hear stations around here?

[Curt Mills]

On Sat, 19 Jun 2004, James Ewen wrote:

> Xastir does not gate the position reports of message originating stations?
>
> Why would you not do so?

Because 99.9% of the people in the local area don't care to see
this station on their screen.  I know I personally have no interest
in it, and always wondered why the decision was made to gate the
position through.

I've heard people complain before about these non-local stations
appearing on their screen.  I'm not in that camp, where it annoys me
to see them, but I still see no utility in having them there.


> If I get a message from you via APRS while I'm out tooling about
> in my truck, how do I find out where you are? Can I query the
> Xastir I-gate some how to get that info? Is there some way for you
> to force the info to me from your end?

No, there's no way to query that I know of.  Send a message to the
other end, asking him/her their location?

I guess I don't see how knowing the location of the remote station
is useful for messaging.  Messaging is the useful part in this case.

As we've heard Bob spout time and time again, APRS is for LOCAL
tactical operations (Doesn't Bob always capitalize "local"?  hi hi).


> APRS is the "Who, what, where, when" tool of Ham Radio. If you
> send me an APRS message, probably one of the first things I'm
> going to want to know is where the heck you are, and what you're
> up to. That's why the position reports follow the message to it's
> destination.

If it's a friend, you probably have previous knowledge of where they
are.  If it's someone you don't know, ask them in another message if
you're that curious.  I would think that if they're courteous to you
and know that you're in the mobile, they'll include some clues about
their position anyway.

Is the position of the other person that important to know while
you're driving, if they are a few states (or countries) away from
you?  Again, it seems to me that the messaging is what's important
here, not the position.


> If my vote counts for anything, I vote to add the position
> forwarding to Xastir... I'll even post this over on the Xastir
> reflector!

Fine (and I see that your message went there).  Please add it to the
feature request list, so that people will continually see it until
somebody implements it, but you'll need to get one of our Xastir
authors interested in implementing it, else it won't ever get done.
Yes, I understand that's why you're working on me!

We have 174 items on that list right now.  People think them up
faster than we can implement them, plus various authors have their
own pet projects that may or may not be on the list.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
  Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"