[OZAPRS] Melbourne APRS Digipeater Status

[Tony King]

Hi All,
Further to my previous irritated rant,

Being retired and somewhat prone to spending more time in the shack than 
is good for me, I get to see what is happening on the aprs.fi screen a 
fair bit .

What I have noticed is the almost complete lack of mobile traffic around 
Melbourne.   In the course of 24hrs their appears to be not more than 
around an average of 10-15 mobile stations recorded.  Most of these are 
regulars going to and from work and are so regular that if they didn't 
appear I feel like I should ring them up to see they are OK. To me this 
doesn't conflict with my own observations of  lots of periods of quiet 
on the 2m frequency. The frequency can't be said to be anywhere near 
overloaded at the moment. In fact compared to 2 years ago the traffic 
appears to be negligible.

Looking at the stations connected to the T2 servers shows that most of 
the VK stations have their filters set for thousands of km. I don't know 
if they are putting these to air but it did strike me as as pretty 
excessive amount of data. I reckoned I was a bit cheeky in setting mine 
to 600km but I wanted to watch a mate who is travelling around vk3 and a 
circle of that diameter based on my station just covered it.. I never 
did work out how to limit the transmissions on my RF (using uiview) to 
just 50km whilst receiving data from 600km from the T2 servers. Can it 
be done?

Like all good amateurs I used the transmission limiting function built 
into UIView to limit the number of transmissions to RF sent per minute 
so I don't feel my station was causing any grief nor would it cause any 
grief by remaining on air as a digi/igate. There are certainly a 
significant number of areas ranging from Christmas Hills to areas of the 
Yarra Valley that are not covered by the various "officially sanctioned" 
repeaters that it services. My fill in function will not be needed with 
the provision of the Yarra Valley Amateur Radio Group fill in digi soon 
to be on Briarties Hill. I might add this is thanks to the provision of 
a couple of cavity filters from a list member. Looking at aprs.fi I can 
see that my station is servicing areas right on the slopes of Mt 
Dandeniong where the "officially sanctioned" repeater is obviously shaded.

<snip> I think if APRS was not around maybe packet may have died ;-)

As a true packet BBS sysop (I use the term /true/ just to differentiate 
from APRS) it is my be belief that true packet is already dead. What we 
are seeing are the last dying twitches of what has been, and still could 
be, a valuable amateur resource, but it was made less than a friendly 
usable service by the  afore mentioned packet police. All you see on 
packet now is an endless repeat of low grade "tech topics" and 3 or 4 
widely scattered stations flaming each other at 1200bps. If it wasn't 
for my last three users I would chuck it in as a BBS sysop.

My personal opinion is that the packet demise  was caused by excessive 
"policing" by organisations that felt the dire need to over regulate the 
operation of the system. All it really did was stifle the technical 
innovation and user interest that would have moved the packet system 
into the 21st century.. .Let's hope we are not seeing the same thing 
happening to APRS. The current packet replacement, the BPQ BBS system, 
is a step in the right innovation direction but it has become an 
internet service not a ham radio service.

I don't think anyone wants to see chaos on the APRS frequencies but 
perhaps a little bit of reasoned thought and coercion rather than 
"orders" might work better.  Even a bit of open discussion on this forum 
rather than the operation of a secret committee behind closed doors 
would help. Who appointed the igates, and what are the technical reasons 
for the selection are a couple of questions that spring to mind. Reading 
the regs I didn't find anything that said I must blindly operate my 
station in accordance with instructions from the secret seven.

Heaven forbid, perhaps we might have a bit of technical and policy 
information and reasoning disseminated on here so that people know what 
is happening in the APRS halls of power.

There are areas my system services in the Yarra Valley that are not, and 
cannot be, serviced by the current repeater system. I will become 
redundant as a digi for this purpose with the provision of the Briarties 
Hill Digi and will then gracefully retire taking all applause and 
acclaim for my efforts off stage, and not "on air", in my usual modest 
fashion.

                                                                         
             Regards Tony VK3API
                                                                                      your humble serf
                                                                                      touching forelock
                                                                                      with left hand
                                                                                      and bowing deeply:-))









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