[Xastir] Re: Wind Gusts

[Curt Mills]

On Sat, 16 Dec 2006, Gerry Creager N5JXS wrote:

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a generic message we can send with
> data that'd not be the official APRS weather format but an addendum to that
> message.  Compressed format, perhaps?  One of the key things we do wrong with
> CWOP/APRS-class stations is report with inadequate precision, wrong averaging
> constants, etc.  Changing the APRS spec for weather is probably not goning to
> happen top-down.  I talked to Bob a year or 2 ago and he spent a long period
> telling me that APRS wasn't designed for what it's now being used for, so FMH
> spec didn't matter. And that he wasn't inclined to change things, and that,
> since I wasn't a s/w author, I had no real standing to request such a
> change...

Yea, your take on it is about right.  If you go look at the weather
chapter in the spec, and then the addendums, you'll see some
inconsistencies even with what's there, and some questions by
me/answers by Bob on some stuff that isn't spelled out in the spec.
Changing the APRS weather spec is pretty much out because the most
popular APRS program out there by far has a deceased author and no
sources left in the world for it, so there's no way to change it.
Other packages would probably take quite a while to change as well,
most likely years.

The spec allows for a user-defined format.  All we'd need to do is
ask Bob for a lead character to separate our sentences from others.
After obtaining that we can do whatever we wish with the format,
compressed or otherwise.  We can even go long with the sentence(s),
I think up to 256 bytes for the info field.

-- 
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!"