[Xastir] recurring email APRS signal

[Tom Russo]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 05:52:04PM -0400, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <RodneyMyers60 at yahoo.com> flavor, containing:
> Is anyone else getting a recurring emergency text from N4GLE for the
> past 3 or 4 days?

Looks like this person has "EMERGENCY COORDINATOR" in his station status.

Xastir has for many years interpreted any packet with EMERGENCY in its
entire line as an emergency beacon, a behavior that I think inherited from
APRS+SA, but not something that the spec requires (near as I can tell, the
spec only requires recognition of the Mic-E emergency message).

I always found that annoying, especially because people like to create objects
with status text like "EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CENTER" or "EMERGENCY SERVICES"
or whatever, and every time they do it triggers an Xastir emergency alert
dialog.  They usually change that to EOC or something after being asked 
politely.  Honestly, I think the feature is incorrectly implemented, and
we shouldn't be keying off randomly placed presence of the word "EMERGENCY"
in a position report.

It looks like N4GLE changed his station status to "DISTRICT E AL EC" instead
of "DISTRICT E AL EMERGENCY COORDINATOR" at around 15:38 MDT, and it was
beaconing the longer one right up until then.  My guess is that these 
notifications are going to stop now.

Xastir has a hard-coded distance check of 280 miles.  If a station saying
it's got an emergency is closer than that, it pops up the notification dialog.
This 280 mile thing seems absurd, and the comment indicates that it is computed
base on a 4-hour trip at 70mph.   I rather doubt that anybody who plans on
answering APRS emergency calls will be traveling 4 hours at 70mph to get to
the emergency.  You could change the variable "emergency_range"  in db.c
from 280.0 to something like what you'd actually be willing to travel to 
respond to a station reporting a real emergency.


-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY
Tijeras, NM  

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