[aprssig] Modification to AE5PL's routing idea

[AE5PL Lists]

Good points. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jason Winningham
> Posted At: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 10:44 AM
> Subject: Re: [aprssig] Modification to AE5PL's routing idea
> 
> This is the only weakness immediately obvious to me: it 
> requires fairly extensive configuration of _all_ digis for 
> anything to work properly beyond one hop.

True, that is part of the point.  Right now, we are trying to tell users
to do this which is even worse.

> This could make it difficult for, say, an SAR team to whip 
> out the portable digi in the incident area, or bringing up a 

A portable digi would work just fine.  In fact, a SAR operation could be
improved because they would be their own "private" LAN and multiple
digipeaters could be easily preconfigured.

> quick replacement digi if something happens to a main digi 
> for an area.  Any sort of "quick and dirty" digi setup would 
> be more complicated than "take it out of the box and turn it on".

You can't do that today with any of the digipeaters.  You have to
configure them all.  This is actually a simpler configuration be cause
you are simply saying "digipeat all directly heards and all directly
digipeated by X".  Where X is zero or more neighboring (not distant)
digipeaters.

> To effectively use this I think we'd need a protocol for 
> learning the local topology and a self configuring digi to match.

No, not necessary.  At most we would be looking at maybe 3 or 4
digipeaters on the "ok to digipeat" list.  In most cases, probably only
zero, one, or two.  This is not difficult and in fact, very powerful.

73,

Pete Loveall AE5PL
mailto:pete at ae5pl.net