[aprs-fl] Fill digipeaters in the area

[Tom Schaefer, NY4I]

Greetings, I have been back int he area for a few years now and I have gotten back into APRS in the last 12 months. I noticed an absence of fill digipeaters in the area evidenced by the holes in the mobile coverage in the area. I wonder if this is a byproduct of the WIDEN change to go away from RELAY. It used to be that home stations would set their uidigi or at least MYALIAS to RELAY to help any mobiles. I typically run a path of WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 in my mobile and while central arteries like US19 seem pretty well covered, we have holes on the perimeter at least in Pinellas. 

So I am curious, is there any level of encouragement to have stations set up home digipeaters that are repeating WIDE1-1 only? A few of us up here in Palm Harbor have been working on fill digipeaters to help the area with low power mobiles and especially D7A and D72A stations (December at NY4I-7 for the latter anyway ). I also have some property in Dunedin close to the Gulf that I plan to place a WIDE1-1 fill digipeater.  

I suspect many stations may think that the "high" wide digipeaters will provide ample coverage, but that is far from the case. A digipeater even 800 feet above the ground does not cover low power trackers adequately.  I realize that Florida is height challenged. I started the expansion of the network in Utah and playing with digipeaters 5000 above ground level does tend to spoil one, but even there we depended upon fill digipeaters for trackers in mountain passes and within the downtown area due to building fade.

If anyone has any ideas on the matter or wants to proffer a plan we can work to find the dead spots (it does seem to be along the beaches in Pinellas County), I would be all ears and much action. I love setting up APRS networks as I think the better tracker network you have the more it is a boon to events like road races, etc for SAG wagon support. It also makes it much nicer to play with small APRS stations like HTs.

L:astly—and if you have read this far, thanks—is there a core group in the area that are the backbone of the APRS network. We had a Utah APRS User's Group that stayed in touch via email regularly especially to share who was putting a digipeater where in the state. I know this list exists, but I saw some recent messages that even questioned the reason to keep this SIG for lack of activity. I would live to know the right place to get into this discussion. I did see the APRSFL website but that seems geared to reporting on APRS stations and usage data versus network infrastructure topics. 

Thanks for reading…

Tom Schaefer, NY4I
727-437-2771