[aprssig] Tracker Smart Pathing

[Wes Johnston]

Smart pathing has nothing to do with the digipeater.  It has to do with 
making a tracker transmit via 1 hop often, and 2 hops less often and 3 hops 
even less often.

A number of years ago I did something like this with my wife's tracker. 
When I was the only one in this town running aprs, I had her car beacon 
every 20 seconds DIRECT, and once a minute out 2 hops.  The tracker only ran 
when the car was switched on, and used a KPC3 tnc.  All the settings had to 
be done manually and it was a moderate aggrivation to setup.  What Bob has 
proposed is the the tracker have the brains to alter it's path every 2nd or 
3rd transmission. Never occurred to me to have a tracker do this 
automatically!

Not to confuse things, but this _concept_ has been used on digipeater beacon 
texts IDs for some time.  The recommented ID for a digipeater is DIRECT 
every 10minutes, our 2 hops every 20 or 30, and 3 hops once an hour.  This 
is configured in the 4 BLT buffers in the TNC.  HOwever for a digipeater to 
support a mobile running smart paths requires no changes to the normal 
WIDEn-n configuration already setup in the digipeater.

Hope I haven't added to the confusion.

Wes



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stan - N0YXV" <n0yxv at gihams.org>
To: "TAPR APRS Mailing List" <aprssig at lists.tapr.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2006 5:55 PM
Subject: RE: [aprssig] Tracker Smart Pathing


>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: aprssig-bounces at lists.tapr.org
>> [mailto:aprssig-bounces at lists.tapr.org]On Behalf Of Jason Rausch
>> Don't get me wrong, the internet tool are awesome and
>> a neat addition to the scheme of things, but they are
>> not my main objective.  I just think alot make that
>> their main objective and it doesn't really feel like
>> radio anymore.  I'll get off my soap box now, I'm done
>> with the subject.
>
> I guess that would depend on what you want to do. If you want others to
> track you, i.e. non hams without UI-VIEW programs, then the APRS-IS
> (Findu.com) would be the objective. If you want to have a QSO with a close
> HAM a couple of digi's away then RF would be your goal. If you live in a
> sparsely covered digi area like I do than you might want your packet to 
> make
> it to the internet so that it can even make it to the next digi. Don't
> forget that in a lot of areas without the internet these digi's couldn't
> even communicate. So while your correct I think it's important for _all_ 
> of
> us to remember that a one size fits all solution probably won't work. It
> _is_ however important from the standpoint of mobiles that _any_ mobile
> traveling _anywhere_ in the US should not have to change settings just
> because they've traveled into a different area.
>
> More on the topic of Smart Pathing I'm reluctant to jump in and say "yes"
> lets do it because as we all know we still haven't gotten everybody to
> implement or understand WIDEn-N. I guess what I'm trying to say is can you
> imagine the Digi operator that comes on board today with WIDEn-N and then 
> we
> tell them ok now you have to add Smart Pathing to your digi. While us
> experimenters and avid APRSers love playing with "How can we make this
> better" there are some digi owners that just want to put the thing up and
> leave it alone. The more often we come to them with another request to
> change the less likely (I believe) they will be to entertain notions of 
> make
> yet one more change. I guess it's kind of like the boy that cried wolf.
> Wouldn't it be better if a few people played with a new idea first before 
> it
> gets launched everywhere? Maybe I'm just missing something and that's not
> what's being proposed but it sure sounds like we might be headed from the
> idea stage to the real world without going through the testing phase. 
> Please
> correct me if I'm miss reading these posts.
>
>
>
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