[aprssig] Weather Stations and Net Neutrality

[Robert Bruninga]

>>> here in Australia we need to use positionless-weather
> We get the wx data from the Authority and transmit 
> it as positionless-weather. Then the posit beacon 
> is sent after the wx data from the APRS station.

But I still don't understand why.  Since it is impossible to
believe that your weather authority just happens to send the
data pre-formatted in APRS format from the government.
Therefore, someone wrote some amateur radio code to take their
existing government weather product and convert it to APRS
positionless-weather format.

>
VK3VHF-6>APRS,WIDE2-2,qAR,VK3WRM:_08160800c248s011g...t048r001p0
12h63b10147XBOM
>  2008-08-16 09:25:04 UTC:
>
VK3VHF-6>APRS,WIDE2-2,qAR,VK3WRM:!3736.22S/14943.42E_Mallacoota
> 
> These are all fixed automatic wx services from the Authority. 

I don't believe it.  Yes, the weather comes from the Authority,
but someone somewhere wrote a conversion program to take the
Authority format and send it out in positionless-weatehr format.
That same person could just as easiliy add the LAT/LONG fields
and make it the complete format so that every packet heard is
complete and valuable.

> Here each states weather Authority has a different 
> format to represent the data. With 8 states that's 
> 8 formats we have to contend with. 

Then someone is already doing the reformatting into APRS.  Have
that person use the APRS complete format instead of the
positionless weather and weatherless position report he is now
doing.  

Bob, Wb4APR