[aprssig] 9600b UHF APRS IS THE FUTURE OF APRS

[Steve Dimse]

On Oct 8, 2006, at 3:22 PM, David Dobbins wrote:

> Unfortunately that will NEVER likely happen with APRS, and the
> transition to 9600 baud UHF APRS will take years beyond what it
> should.

Unfortunately UHF 9600 baud AX-25 is not eight times more speed for a  
little more money. There are serious problems with it, things like  
increased path loss and multipath. Deviation setup is critical so it  
does not lend itself to the modern appliance operator ham. Finally,  
throughput is far less than an eight-fold increase when considering  
short messages like APRS uses.

A lot of money to build a new infrastructure for maybe twice the  
bandwidth. In my opinion worldwide APRS never will transition to UHF  
9600 baud, and never should. There are situations where it may be  
worthwhile for local areas to use it as a supplement, but I don't see  
that it could ever become the primary mode of APRS.

Steve K4HG