[Xastir] Any ideas? YB8ZD->NWS_APRS

[Tom Russo]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 10:15:32AM -0600, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <kc7zru at kc7zru.net> flavor, containing:
> Getting these lines in the console I started Xastir in. Hundreds of 'em
> over and over. Don't think it's a problem in Xastir. More curious as to
> what it may mean.

> Ideas?

It means you are receiving packets that look like NWS alerts, but haven't got
as many fields as are expected.  The alert.c code that generates this message
is testing that a particular parsing of the data returned at least 3 fields.

sscanf is supposed to return the number of fields it successfully processed,
which in your example is only 1, where we're expecting at least 3.

Check the man page for sscanf on your system --- does it say that the return
value is the number of input items assigned?  

> sscanf parsed 1 values in alert.c (3-7 ok) YB8ZD->NWS_APRS: logsheet APRS
> Net diposting pd milis orari-news at yahoogroups.com
> sscanf parsed 1/3 values in alert.c

It looks like the function "alert_build_list" is getting tripped up by the
fact that this YB8 station is sending a non-alert packet to NWS_APRS.  I 
see that several YB and YC stations are sending messages to NWS_APRS that
aren't alerts over the last few weeks.  Don't know why you should be getting
hundreds of them, though.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
 "It's so simple to be wise: just think of something stupid to say and
  then don't say it."  --- Sam Levinson