[OZAPRS] APRS with Foundation license

[Scott Evans]

As an I-gate sysop, there is only one way an F call will appear from the
Internet to RF is if they are using a valid call pass, Now for those of
us that use Linux the code for such is freely available and is
distributed with both APRSD & XASTIR (possibly others) so for instance..

callpass VK7FXXX
Passcode for VK7FXXX is 4791

Now there is nothing preventing any person Amateur or otherwise from
receiving APRS data, but this is not the issue, it the transmission
coming most likely from an iPhone/Android application or a PC. the F
call in this instance should ONLY enter a call pass of -1 (or left blank
if that is what the client prefers) 

There was much discussion a while back on the javAPRSSvr mailing list
(this is the software used by the CORE & T2 servers and also by some
I-Gate sysops, myself included) on developing a better way to
authenticate a users credentials, there was talk of using SSL certs but
the maintenance would be horrendous! not to mention breaking
compatibility with older APRS clients like UI-View etc... So this  was
soon knocked on the head as being to time consuming to maintain and
implement, after all this is a hobby not on-line banking!

So my take on this is that whilst the LCD states what is does for each
grade of licence, we are obliged to adhere to them, of course there will
be a minority that won't but you get that with any rules & regs! 

I for one will not be implementing any such "filtering" to catch out any
possible breach of license, I only have the APRS spec ALIAS's set and
that's for nogate/rfonly/nocall I certainly don't have the time to sit
and monitor every packet that is transmitted within range of my I-Gate!

-- 
Scott Evans <scott at vk7hse.hobby-site.org>
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