APRS Wide2-1 or Wide1-1

I recently asked a friend why his club's Digipeter did not receive APRS transmissions from my plane. Below is the response from the person who runs their site.

"... we shouldn't have seen his packets since he was not sending packets we translate!!!

I looked at a lot of his raw packets and he is sending WIDE2 in one form or another - which is correct BTW. As a fill-in digi, we only respond to WIDE1. The job of WA6ODP is to "fill-in" for the WIDE2 repeaters such as W6CX who saw all of his packets. Especially for an aircraft, we don't want to be responding to signals that can be received by the high-level digis. This is to reduce the traffic - a major problem here in the Bay area - and it serves no purpose for us to send messages that have already been handled by the system.

A lot of people seem to not understand how the message traffic is handled and why we really push people to understand what they are transmitting and to keep it to the minimum necessary to get their location reported. As an aircraft, if he sent out WIDE1 packets, he would saturate the system in a matter of seconds !!!

He did just fine - the system did what it was to do - AND WA6ODP did just what it was to do. Everything worked."

Leland
RV9A
MicroTrak 300
AV-17 antenna
Programmed with Wide2-1 only
http://aprs.fi/?call=N137LC&mt=m&z=11&timerange=86400

good points

About to get a Tiny Trak 3 up and running here. I'll first config it for WIDE2-1 to see if/where it hits.

Yes, WIDE2-1 is recommended for aircraft trackers for the reasons stated in the original post. We are high enough to hit the primary digipeaters without the aid of the "little" fill-in repeaters. A ground-based tracker would benefit from having WIDE1-1 in the path.

There may be occasions or locations where adding WIDE1-1 to the path would provide better coverage for aircraft tracking but this is the exception rather than the norm. But we don't want to saturate the network by creating more bounces than necessary.