[aprssig] Why RELAY,WIDE... is so bad....

[Chris Kantarjiev]

> I thought WIDE2-2 was agreed as the universal path?  At least, that was 
> the word I got from Bob.  That doesn't mean that is is the ONLY path, 
> but it needs to work everywhere.

It all depends on what you mean by "work".

I run two fill-in digis, based on TNC2s. One is filling a small hole
in the busy SF Bay Aread - it's based on UIDIGI, but doesn't currently
participate in any of the flooding protocols. It *will* digipeat
RELAY and WIDE2-2, and around here, a single hop will get you
to an IGate. So, for a particular value of "work", that's good enough.

The other digi is in the mountains south of Yosemite. There's
no other coverage for at least 35 miles. It's a TNC2, but it's
running PacComm 5.0. It responds to RELAY, WIDE2-2, WIDE3-3, but
those end up being single hops. The IGate that hears this machine
is about 100 miles away and only hears packets about half the day
(due to propogation and "hidden terminals"). I have plans to
add an IGate there, once I find some sufficiently cheap hardware
and port a simple IGate client - it's not an environment where
I want to deploy a PC powered by 110V in a full-size case (I'm 
looking at something like the Ethernut board). 

I run TNC2s because they're cheap. Unfortunately, the available
software is not exactly what we want - UIDIGI hasn't been updated
for a few years; Marco is showing some signs of life, but I 
don't know that he's really interested in following the digipeater
trend of the week.

I'm one of many folks that want/need a cheap, standalone, functional
digipeater alternative. Scott knows that I'm interested in contributing
code to his effort. I'm not really set up to do hardware development.
$25 PIC-based TNCs are neat, but they're nothing more than
intellectual exercises if they don't have smart digi code. The
release of digi_ned is wonderful, but it's way too clunky at
this point for small devices such as the ones I and many others
want to run.

By all means, let's figure out the "right" way to do this. Test
it out with the fixed home digis that are running on PCs. And
then let's build something that is cheap enough to replace
all those KPC3s.

73 de chris KG6VYD