[aprssig] bad PHG, or lots of big towers?

[Robert Bruninga]

>Looking through the data Bob posted I find 46 digis with advertised 
>heights of 5120ft (a mile!) and 140 with heights of 2560 ft.
>Are there 186 towers over half a mile high with digis on them? 

One of the problems is that one of the most commonly used
APRS clones does not even display PHG, so its users have
no clue what PHG means, what the RF ranges are for
the digis or even other HOME stations.  They are somewhat
blind to what is going on on RF.  (hence if it doesnt work,
they just bump up the N counter to WIDE7-7 till it does)...

Another popular program displays the circles in only one
color so it is hard to see the digi's from the users.

And lastly the displayed radius of the circle was cut in
HALF a few years ago to recognize that the communication
range to a Mobile is about half what it is to a fixed 
station.  By making all the circles at half-size the map
view is much less cluttered.

Anyway, without all the users seeing this stuff, it is 
somewhat undertandable why none of them care
about the difference in HAAT and AGL etc...

But we hope to fix that.  APRS should consider HAM radio first.
and we must get users to visualize the RF network better.

Thanks
Bob, WB4APR