[aprssig] An Anniversary Cheer for Stephen Smith

[Robert Kirk]

Cap Pennell's in a recent message commented that  "The North American "New 
n-N Paradigm" is already helping our stations (a lot) to conserve our 
limited available airtime on VHF[...]" and also mentioned, in passing, 
Stephen WA8LMF.

That reminded me of just  how much the "New Paradigm" has improved APRS 
throughput in just the last  year, thanks much to Bob Brununga's tireless 
prodding. Those RELAY and path discussions were (are) endless and didn't 
seem to  be going anywhere. At least now we've eliminated the RELAY problem 
and, barring smart software, probably reached a plateau.

Cap's message jogged my memory, and a quick check of the archives shows 
that only a year ago Stephen proposed:

>Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 15:01:14 -0800
>From: "Stephen H. Smith" <wa8lmf2 at aol.com>
>...
>Subject: Re: [aprssig] Why RELAY,WIDE... is so bad....
>
>On the issue of how to combine home digi first-hop-assist with true 
>WIDEn-N systems without using first-hop RELAY:
>How about a path of    "WIDE1-1, WIDE1-1"    or    "WIDE1-1, WIDE2-2"    ??
>Set the alias of the former home "RELAY" digi to WIDE1-1 instead.   If a 
>"dumb" home former-RELAY-type digi does the first digipeat, it marks 
>WIDE1-1 as used.
>Then the true WIDEn-N digi(s) get a shot at the second part of the 
>path.   I assume that in the absence of a nearby home digi, a "real" 
>WIDEn-N would digi the first hop, then the WIDE2-2 part would cause two 
>more digipeats.
>The path is compatible with either    first-hop-via-home-station,   or 
>with all hops via    n-N-only    true wides and preserves exclusively 
>dupe-supressing WIDEn-N type paths. [...]

So a tip of the hat to the originator of the WIDE1-1 concept to solve the 
fill-in digi problem.

Bob Kirk
N3OZB