[OZAPRS] APRS with Foundation license

[Richard Hoskin]

Hi All,

 

Ray alluded to this in an earlier post and after talking the WIA on this
subject both for APRS & D-Star I understand the following;

 

The key words and definitions in this are;

 

1)       Intent (general legal jargon)

2)       Reasonable measures. (LCD para 11A (2) )

 

First the question to be asked is what Reasonable measures (actions that the
operator can be reasonably be expected to take) has the IGate operator taken
to adhere to the LCD and prevent a non-authorized transmission from his /
her station.

 

The answer is that he/she has implemented a Passcode system by means of the
IGate / APRS-IS software that will not allow any inadvertent non-authorized
transmission to emanate from their station.

The Passcode is considered an international standard which is used
throughout the APRS-IS network to limit inadvertent (accidental) RF access
and as such should protect the IGate owner from regulation breaches.

 

 

The Second question is; What is the intent of the person generating the
non-authorized transmission?

 

The answer; It could be argued that the if a non-authorized person goes to
the trouble of finding, generating then configuring a Passcode into an APRS
application then the Intent of that person is to generate an non-authorized
transmission and hence the onus is on that person, not the IGate operator.

 

It does not matter that the generator of the non-authorized transmission is
or is not aware of the regulations (sorry officer I didn't see the 60kmh
sign), by their actions it was the Intent of that person to generate a
transmission on the APRS network (the network consists of both APRS-IS and
RF). Hence that person is accountable for the non-authorized transmission.

 

 

For what it's worth the use of a Passcode could be interpreted that the APRS
network (both APRS-IS and RF) is a non-public transmission network carried
over a public communications network. IE a VPN or in old packet terms a
gateway tunnel. This would not however change the Intent of the person
generating the non-authorized transmission.

 

Hope this is helpful.

 

Cheers

Richard

VK3JFK

 

 

 

  _____  

From: ozaprs-bounces at aprs.net.au [mailto:ozaprs-bounces at aprs.net.au] On
Behalf Of Ray Wells
Sent: Tuesday, 5 October 2010 7:22 PM
To: ozaprs at aprs.net.au
Subject: Re: [OZAPRS] APRS with Foundation license

 

Nor should we have to monitor every packet, Scott.

Ray vk2tv

On 05/10/10 19:17, Scott Evans wrote: 

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> 

 
 
_______________________________________________
OZAPRS mailing list
OZAPRS at aprs.net.au
http://lists.aprs.net.au/mailman/listinfo/ozaprs
  

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.aprs.net.au/pipermail/ozaprs/attachments/20101006/1e78f0b4/attachment.htm