So a guy shows up at my door this afternoon out of the blue and gives me a mini tutorial on APRS. He says I've been blasting my position all over Western Washington whenever I go flying. His first suggestion was to put my email address on qrz.com so people can get a hold of me without going to my home.
His second suggestion was to use just a path of WIDE2-1. Apparently the WIDE1-1 in there makes all the mountain top digipeaters as well as home-based digipeaters repeat my position. He said using WIDE2-1 would hit all the mountain-top digipeaters, which would be sufficient when you're up at altitude.
And his third suggestion was to get a better transmitter. He said the Tiny/Micro-Trak units stomp on other people's transmissions. I guess Allen will have to comment on that.
I'm going to try making that change next weekend and see if I still get pretty good coverage.
Dave
Wow.....don't know if I would have the nerve to walk up to a stranger's door and "tell" them how they are messing up the ham bands.......here in the South that is a good way to get a face-full of buckshot.
Dave, hopefully Allen will weigh in on this matter but as one who has already been slammed by an old-timer ham about how we are destroying the APRS system I can relate to your experience. I totally disagree with the individual's opinion who got on my case since most of his argument was emotional rather than rational. Hopefully the individual who took the time to track you down was sincere about wanting to assist you with your APRS experience.
Let me preface my remarks with this observation. After perusing some ham forums I have come to the realization that many hams are a very surly bunch. There is open hostility, and I mean
hostility, on the part of some hams toward those of us who snuck into ham-dom without earning that right by learning Morse code. To these old-timers, the "no-coders" are just a bunch of riff-raff that have no right participating in "their" hobby. (Sorta like LSA pilots aren't
real pilots?????
)
I don't know if this attitude had any role to play in the visit you enjoyed, but we have to recognize its presence. The fact that we have the audacity as undeserving license holders to operate a tracker from an
airplane is just cause for these Keepers of the Faith to straighten us out.
Having said that, I am very open to ways we can be good citizens of the APRS community. If changing our path to WIDE2-1 will provide us the coverage we need, then I will make the change. The insistence on WIDE2-1 for airborne trackers is not universally accepted but does seem to be what the hams in your area consider good practice:
http://www.nwaprs.info/mobilesettings.htm
Perhaps with mountain top digis WIDE2-1 will work well in your area. It remains to be seen whether or not it works well for us flatlanders. The problem is we have no way to monitor realtime how well our packets are making it to the network. Consequently we must use configurations that have the best possible chance of providing good service in whatever environment our planes are flown. One flight can carry us over mountains and wide open spaces in the course of a couple hours. Which settings do we use, the "mountain" config or the "flatland" config? This is a situation the ground-bound APRS users don't have to deal with and possibly haven't considered. I intend to use a configuration that works in the widest possible range of environments because a crippled tracker is worse than no tracker at all.
In regard to the "problem" with the Byonics trackers, that matter has been discussed previously. The only practical way for an airborne tracker to operate is to transmit in the blind as do our trackers. If your tracker waited for a clear frequency before transmitting, since it can hear every tracker within 500 miles, we would most likely never have a chance to send a packet. Even if our unit found an opening in which to transmit, it would butt heads with any other nearby airborne tracker that was doing the same.
The ground-bound APRS'ers are just going to have to live with our blind trackers. We need to use sensible beacon intervals (we are), smartbeaconing (we are), and brief, concise packets (we are).
Until airborne trackers are deemed illegal, we are entitled to use the trackers in our aircraft in keeping with FCC regulations and common sense. I get the sense most hams are intrigued with our airborne trackers and delight in the expansion of the realm. But there are a few vocal malcontents as previously mentioned. I found it interesting the owner of aprs.fi that we all use has discovered us and posted on his blog some very nice comments about airplane trackers:
http://oh7lzb.blogspot.com/2008/03/trackers-in-airplanes.html
One more point. If we were broadcasting packets 24/7 I can see where there would be cause for concern about frequency congestion. But consider how many hours each week you are actually using the APRS network. Our usage is a
fraction of the total net load. No doubt reasonable hams recognize this fact and will happily invite us to be partners in the APRS system. The ham population is thinning and graying just as the pilot universe, and reasonable hams will recognize that all new members of the service need to be welcomed instead of chastised.