[aprssig] Re: Functional path to hit both WIDE and WIDEn-n digis?

[William McKeehan]

I understand 100% what you are talking about. We have a digi in the Knoxville,
TN Area (WA4KJH-7) that dominated because of it's location. It is an old style
digi that only responds to RELAY,WIDE and TN.

The guy that setup that digi (not WA4KJH-7, but someone else; it was just
under WA4KJH's control) has been out of APRS for a while and was not real
happy about the change to 144.39 that happened way back when; as a result, we
could not motivate him to change the digi to the new WIDEn-N settings.

Originally, I convinced all of the local fill-in digi operators to set
themselves up to respond to both RELAY and WIDE1-1. This helped fill the gap
and gave mobile stations at least one hop which was often enough to get them
into an I-Gate.

Even with this setup, when I went mobile, I changed my settings to RELAY,WIDE
in hopes that the big digi would hear and respond to my packets.

After running that way for a while, a group of APRS folks came together,
raised funds (by passing the hat) and acquired equipment (by donation and
purchase) to put up a new WIDEn-N digi. About the time that we were ready to
put the digi on the air, another fellow was able to move his digi (WA4RYW-7)
from a low level location to a very good location (on the same tower as
WA4KJH-7) providing the area with a much needed high-level WIDEn-N digi.

The benefit to this setup is that now, any mobile traveling in the Knoxville
area will generally get digi'd by a high level digi if they are running the
new WIDEn-N style path or the older RELAY,WIDE path.

So I guess I said all of that to say don't give up; maybe you'll be able to
replace old digi's or get new ones up one day.
-- 
William McKeehan
KI4HDU

On Thu, April 26, 2007 1:38 pm, Alex Carver wrote:
> Yes, I understand all this but explain to me how to
> convince a sysop to add something to a digipeater when
> they don't want to change the thing in the first
> place.  I asked the question about the path because,
> as of right now, APRS is completely useless if I don't
> even get digipeated when I'm out and about.  I can
> hear plenty of traffic but my own posits never go
> anywhere, APRS-IS or otherwise.  The digis aren't
> going to change overnight and emails to the owners
> have gone unanswered.  So all I can do is stop using
> APRS completely or adjust my path to make it
> functional even if it's not in the way you want.