so i suddenly wasn't getting my aprs packet data posted on the web site logs - i figured something was up with my transceiver and went to take a look. everything seemed fine, although it wasn't chirping as much, confirming that any packets were getting out.
on a whim i checked for messages. seems the northwest aprs digipeaters installed an upgrade, and the stock 'relay, wide' setting is no longer 'supported'. perhaps this is just a coincidence actually, but it made me change the stock setting in the radio.
what's both amazing and lame here is that :
1) good - i got bulletins, text messages over my radio abou the change.
2) bad - the messages were terribly terse, broken up, and cut off.
3) bad - an upgrade to area digipeater 'servers' required 'clients' change settings?
4) good - radios have configurable settings, and accommodate system changes.
5) bad - ham operator don't spell things out, and use acronyms for everything.
6) good - made the change, it's working.
ok that last note stems from the fact while was trying to read up on the change (bulletin directed me to the nwaprs.com web site), i was faced with some terse explanations with abbreviations. i think ham radio suffers from a culture that grew up in an area when bandwidth and data was severely limited, and valuable. guess i'm used to the internet, being more of a text medium, things are almost naturally documented. anyway, the more amateur enthusiasts there are out there, the better -- and the more the folks understand how radios work, the better. so, stop using acronyms and codes, spell it out. we'll all benefit from clarity.
alright, back to it - so... the upgrade is to eliminate duplicate aprs packets. while i'm not 100% certain on the factors at hand, i would think the arps digipeaters could handle dealing with 'relay' verse 'wide' traffic without any changes to my mobile radio... but whatever. i'm glad i got this up and running, all tested out, before the change. now i'll just update the stock setting on the radio. no problem. And i could be wrong about the *requirement* to change as well. seems that way.
alright, the new setting is 'WIDE1-1, WIDE2-1' for mobiles.
wide1 is a node covering a smaller local area 'footprint', wide2 is a node covering a wide area. the second number, is the number of hops the packets should be transmitted over the repeater network. simple, straightforward? i suppose so.
both local and wide area digipeaters will respond to the 'wide1' setting if heard, and relay the traffic. however, the resulting traffic won't result in duplicate packets (probably due to how the packets are rebroadcast, decoded and evaluated by each other). i'm speculating now.
oh, here's some explination on the change . . .
http://www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/aprs/relaypaths.txt
http://www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/aprs/relayFIX.txt
so far i'm still not having luck getting my packets forwarded to the internet. i'm not sure if there's a glitch, or all digipeaters out there are handling things properly.