[Xastir] Re: 'Owning' station ID?

[Rick Green]

On Thu, 28 Oct 2004, Bill Vodall wrote:

>
> >   I personally believe that messaging is a
> > totally inappropriate use of APRS.
>
> Messaging, one-to-one or one-to-many is the best use of APRS.  It may
> not be totally efficient (given 1200 baud AFSK to start with, that's not
> much of an issue) but it works well.
>
> What needs to be banned is all the dumb (smart?) trackers that have zilch
> communications value and just run around spewing packets.  (P( :-) ) > .9 )
>
  Actually, if you look back, the original design of APRS was for dumb
xmit-only trackers.  Bob's original presentation at a Dayton Packetbash
many years ago talked about tracking moving objects, taking advantage of
the short packets and random intervals to avoid collisions, and the FM
capture effect in the case of a collision to receive clearly the closer
station.
  The decision to add weather telemetry info wasn't so bad, in that it
gives the viewer more situational awareness of the area, but it did
introduce fixed stations to the channel, so power, gain, and HAAT were no
longer in parity, so the capture effect started working against us, and
the low-power simple trackers, the original purpose of APRS. suffered.
  But the death of real APRS came with the addition of messaging.  I find
it totally inappropriate to use a channel intended for broadcast packets
for a point-to-point ragchew.  If your communication is intended for just
one person, please QSY.  If I had my 'druthers, it'd be struck from the
spec.

-- 
Rick Green

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
 temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
                                  -Benjamin Franklin