[aprssig] Internet to RF gating of positions

[Scott Miller]

If I remember correctly, IGates are supposed to gate a position for a 
station to RF when they pass a message from that station to RF, right? 
Do they all do this?  If so, do they pass the last heard position, or do 
they wait for another one?  Is this actually documented anywhere?

I had an idea to create a Geocaching gateway - you'd just send a message 
to CACHE and it would respond by sending (as stations, in case objects 
aren't gated) positions for the nearest few (non-virtual) caches, plus 
messages including difficulty and name.  For example:

:GCK7X7   :Eagle Reef Scuba Cache D4/T5/R

That's difficulty = 4, terrain = 5, regular size.  Multi-part and other 
non-traditional caches could be excluded, since they usually require 
more information than you could squeeze into a brief message.

Fortunately the caches all have unique 6-digit identifiers already that 
aren't likely to be duplicated on APRS.  Making the system useful 
requires getting position packets for the caches to the requester, though.

The other difficulty is getting access to the Geocaching API to do the 
queries in the first place.  I'm looking into that, though.

Scott
N1VG