[OZAPRS] Foundation and RF APRS

[Carlos PECO BERROCAL]

Marcus,

My personal thoughts, in random order:

- You can do PACTOR-4 in Australia and get away with it.
- Which means to me that any obfuscated/funny protocol seems to be ignored
by the Regulator, but if you are not a sociopath you'll transmit your
callsign at the same frequency and from the same location every now and
then.
- Callsigns are useful to identify the source of transmissions in case of
interference, so the Regulator can have your LOCATION easily.
- There are $5 modules on ebay where you can record-replay a 8-second voice
snippet. It can contain your voice or CW tones.
- Most people just mumble their callsigns very fast without using any sort
of meaningful phonetic alphabet, in practical terms that makes them
unidentifiable to the Regulator, who could not care less (they do care when
there is a serious interference issue).
- You can have a radio "A" for APRS and a radio "B" to broadcast your
callsign every now and then.
- If callsigns of the form 1F, 2F, 3F... are not allocated by ITU, I see
not problem with aprs.fi propagating them. What aprs.fi does in Finland is
probably out of the list of concerns to the Regulator.

So, essentially, I don't see any problem because everybody knows who is
3FJTS and can be easily tracked down in case of problems. By the way, he's
carrying a GPS and telling the Regulator about his whereabouts ;-)

If there was a crackdown on people not identifying themselves correctly
(look at how careful the Indonesians are when giving their callsigns, that
does not happen by accident) or if the Regulator was prosecuting people for
operating PACTOR-4 in amateur bands, then my perception would be very
different.


These are just my thoughts, everybody will have their own. Not trying to
convince people about the Earth being flat.

73,
Carlos VK1EA



On Thu, Dec 19, 2019 at 11:07 PM Marcus B <mrmabs at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey all (and I know VK3FJTS is here as well),
>
> I noticed an interesting solution to the foundation call and AX.25 issue,
> and I'm also keeping in mind the discussions about odd callsigns breaking
> all kinds of things back in the DPRS days. And I have not seen discussion
> on this topic really anywhere, other than "no, it's not possible, it's the
> way it is; wait until they fix the callsigns".
>
> Firstly I did a search of the group and found Jack (3FJTS) discussing the
> inability to put a 7 character callsign into his radio, that is a
> limitation of the AX.25 protocol written in the 1970's where the main part
> of the callsign can only be 6 characters, no exceptions sadly. After that
> the number is a 4-bit number that's only 0 to 15. Any change to update the
> protocol would likely break a lot of (meaning all) equipment from the past
> 40 years. There are better & longer explanations in the history of this
> group.
>
> So, back to the story, on my HT, going through Victoria today, I saw
> "3FJTS" on my screen, firstly I had a double take (what country was 3F?!),
> and I thought that was a neat solution, and I'm pretty sure, as the VK can
> be inferred in Australia, it should be legal, as long as we all recognise
> that "3FJTS" == "VK3FJTS". The identification is not being hidden and
> logical, and the full callsign is in the comment.
>
> But what about being fed into APRS IS? I've never been an admin or really
> been involved with the infrastructure, is this fine to propagate?
>
> If so, could this be pushed out as a solution for foundation licencees
> that would allow many of them to take full advantage of their radios. This
> would also be a great solution for using packet as well. I happy to promote
> this wider, talking to the WIA, etc...
>
> Oh, and anyone that doesn't agree, please be tactful and factual with your
> responses, this is not about bashing, it's about enabling. Unless its about
> the decision to create 7-letter calls, then I totally agree :P
>
> 73,
> vk3tst / vk5wtf
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