[aprssig] Re: 433.800

[Tapio Sokura]

Andy AB9FX wrote:
> WIDEn-n standards? In Poland we do not have any more TRACEn-n or TRACE. 
> Just WIDEn-n and SPn-n, in addition we still keep RELAY and WIDE for 
> continental compatibility. Not many information about SSn-n in other 
> European countries.

I have a feeling many European countries haven't followed on the newn-n 
trail, at least Finland hasn't. I'd say one reason is in the continous 
changes that took place when Bob came up with it. People are still in 
some way waiting what Bob will come next and whether it will be sensible 
to follow that. Since the current APRS network in Finland is almost 
fully duplicate filtering anyway (independent of the ax.25 path), newn-n 
wouldn't really bring that much benefits.

The idea of geographically limiting distribution by the sender (ssn-n) 
is ok, but I'd like to see is a more generic way of specifying the area 
over which a packet is digipeated. The tricks newn-n does with 
uiflood/uitrace in kpc-3 and similar parameters in other tncs give you 
one area to use (if you intend to support wide as well). I guess it's 
better than nothing.

To generalize, I wish there was less of the mentality "what can we do 
with the old stuff we already have" and more of "what do we need to do 
to make it really work". If the latter requires new software or hardware 
or even breaking compatibility with some of the old equipment in use, 
then so be it. I'm glad things are happening on this front as well, like 
n1vg's new tnc project.

Just about all functioning large scale networks have the brains of the 
system in the central nodes/routers of the network, not in the end user 
nodes. The fact is that you can play with the parameters of a KPC-3 till 
the end of the world and it still won't automatically adjust to current 
traffic density or drop packets from stations that are, say, further 
than 100 km away. NSR should be the norm and source-routing a rare 
exception.

   Tapio